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tag:democracynow.org,2014-05-05:en/story/648087 AMY GOODMAN : It was 10 years ago last week when CBS News first broadcast photographs of American soldiers and contractors torturing and sexually humiliating prisoners in Iraq. The New Yorker soon published a story on its website called &quot;Torture at Abu Ghraib&quot; by Seymour Hersh. The photos from inside the prison shocked the world. One showed a hooded Iraqi man standing on a box with his electrical wires attached to his outstretched arms. Another showed a U.S. soldier holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked prisoner. Another photograph showed a U.S. soldier giving the thumbs up while posing next to the body of a dead prisoner.
At the time, the Bush administration condemned the abuse as the work of a &quot;few bad apples.&quot; A few low-ranking soldiers were sentenced to prison, but none of the contractors involved with running the prison were prosecuted. No high-ranking military official was held responsible, and reparations were never paid to the Iraqi prisoners.
Today we bring you the story of one former prisoner in his own words. Salah Hassan was detained in November of 2003 while working as a journalist for Al Jazeera in Iraq. He&#8217;s now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights against the private contractor CACI International, known by many simply as CACI . According to the lawsuit, employees of CACI working at Abu Ghraib allegedly threatened Salah Hassan with dogs, deprived him of food, beat him, and kept him naked in a solitary cell in conditions of sensory deprivation. I spoke to Salah Hassan last week. He was in Doha, Qatar, where he still works for Al Jazeera. I began by asking about when he was first arrested.
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] First, I would like to thank you for giving me the chance to meet with you and discuss an issue that is 10 years old. Of course, the place where I was arrested was the district of Diyala, north of Baghdad, about 10 years ago. This was the first place of arrest. After that, I was moved from one place to another &#8217;til I ended up in Abu Ghraib prison.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you explain, Salah, who arrested you? And then describe what happened to you at Abu Ghraib.
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Actually, it is assumed that the people who arrested me in the district of Diyala are from the American Army, but I cannot really differentiate if they are truly individuals from the Army or from private security companies, because most people there used to wear military outfits and without military ranking insignia/badges that might have clarified their affiliation to the Army or other institutions.
AMY GOODMAN : Where were you arrested? Can you talk about what you were doing at that time, and even before you made it to Abu Ghraib, where you were taken?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Of course. This is the main point of this issue. The issue is that I am a journalist, and I was at my workplace covering the events in the district of Diyala, north of Baghdad. It is my duty to cover events in the field and on the ground, as well as political events. So my arrest happened while I was doing my journalistic duty. There was an explosion in that area. I went to that place to try to take some photographs and gather information about this incident. After I was done with all this work, I was surprised that a man in a military uniform ordered my arrest. After that, I was moved from one station to another. The first of these stations was in the same district, Diyala. Then I was moved to another airport that is used as a military base, also in Diyala district. Then I was moved by helicopter, alone, to another district, which is the district of Salahuddin located north of Diyala district. Of course, I was kept in each of these stations for a day or two. And from the last station, I was moved to Abu Ghraib prison.
AMY GOODMAN : Were you hurt? Were you injured in this time by those who had captured you?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] The helicopter moved me from Diyala to Salahuddin, then from Salahuddin to Abu Ghraib by military trucks. Of course, I was subjected to a lot of hurt and harm during this period, being moved from station to station. The simplest thing was being very tightly handcuffed and having my legs restrained with metal iron chains. They also left me in tiny rooms with no food or water. They also verbally abused me throughout my detainment in all these stations.
AMY GOODMAN : Did they understand, Salah Hassan, that you were a journalist with Al Jazeera?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Of course they know I am a journalist with Al Jazeera. And their knowledge is solid since I could not have worked in the district without getting permission from the American forces that were present in the district. There was a media office, and we provided this media office with all the names of the crew, and the office gave us special permit cards for media coverage. So they do know me well. Also, I have previously worked with them, and I have previously gone to this media office more than once. There was an officer in the American forces, who was the liaison for the journalists who worked in this district. So, consequently, I was not at all a stranger to them.
AMY GOODMAN : Salah Hassan, describe what happened when you first came to Abu Ghraib.
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] The details are many, in reality. I cannot summarize it or limit it to a few short minutes. But for me as a journalist, this was a huge shock. I did not expect it at all that a journalist would be treated in this manner. I have many friends from America, and I know that the American society does not allow or accept these kinds of behavior and that this behavior would be coming from people who do not believe in democracy or who have a lot of problems. Consequently, what happened in Abu Ghraib was very difficult, an extremely big shock.
As soon as I arrived to the prison, they ordered me to strip off all my clothes. And as you know, we, in an Oriental, Eastern society, and taking off all of our clothes in the culture is a very difficult issue, which the people of this area cannot bear. This is an issue related to honor and to family and community values. This was the first issue that I was subjected to in Abu Ghraib prison. I remained without clothes, I remember, from 5:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. of the following day.
AMY GOODMAN : Was a hood placed or a plastic bag placed over your head?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Yes, I had a black hood on my head, and my hands were tied upward, and I remained in this state for long hours. I had medical issues in my stomach. Some excretion was going out of my mouth involuntarily and falling to the ground. But all of this was of no consequences to the guards in the prison. On the contrary, they were laughing. And even at midnight or after midnight, I heard some people singing, in English, of course, &quot;Happy Birthday, Al Jazeera.&quot; The message is clear: You are with Al Jazeera, so you will celebrate your birthday here, or something of this kind.
AMY GOODMAN : Were you forced, Salah Hassan, to stand for many hours at a time, hooded, naked?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Of course. I was helpless and could not object or not comply because, as military men, they had more power than me. They forced me. At the beginning, when they asked me to take off my clothes, I refused, of course, and told them, &quot;I will not take my clothes off.&quot; They said to me, &quot;You either take them off yourself, or we will take them off for you.&quot; Then I realized they are serious, so I started taking off some pieces like my pants and shirt, but they insisted that I strip completely. I told them it is impossible and I cannot take off all my clothes. They said, &quot;You either take them off, or we will.&quot; So I had to take off all my clothes, timidly, the hood on my head. I put my hand to cover my genitals, very embarrassed. These were very difficult moments. I transformed, in a second, from a journalist on the ground who has a social status and people look at me in a certain way—I have my familial and social values and status—to a humiliated person stripped down forcefully, very naked, helpless. This was a huge shock in these moments. These were the first hours of getting into the Abu Ghraib prison. And, of course, there are more details from the following days.
AMY GOODMAN : The secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously said in a memo, when the description of people being held for hours at a time standing, that he stands at his desk for 11 hours, he doesn&#8217;t call that torture. Could you respond to this, Salah Hassan?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Well, I can stay standing in the street for a whole day on my own volition. There is no problem there. But when I am forced to stand in this humiliating manner, without clothes, hooded and handcuffed, I believe this is a different situation. It is very different.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Salah Hassan, an Al Jazeera journalist who was jailed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. When we come back, we&#8217;ll hear more of Salah talking about how he was psychologically and physically tortured, and we&#8217;ll speak with the Center for Constitutional Rights about their lawsuit against the private contractor CACI International, or CACI . This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman. It was 10 years ago last week when the world first viewed the shocking photos of U.S. military personnel humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. We return now to our interview with Salah Hassan, an Al Jazeera journalist who was jailed at Abu Ghraib. I spoke with him on the 10th anniversary of the release of the photographs at his offices, his studio, in Doha, Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based. I asked Salah where he was held at Abu Ghraib and who was holding him there.
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] In the Abu Ghraib prison, there were solitary cells, probably not more than 50 or 60 cells. When I arrived to Abu Ghraib, I stayed for one day at the outdoor tent. Then, after a very brief, simple interrogation, they transferred me to one of those solitary cells. Of course, I was not able to see from my cell all the other people in the other cells, but I knew that there are other detainees, some of them arrested on charges of terrorism, some accused of civil charges. There were many.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you encounter dogs?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Throughout my detainment in the solitary cells, there was an interrogation every two or three days. During these interrogations, we were subjected to many psychological and physical torture methods. One of these methods was that you were kept naked, handcuffed, the hood on your head, then they would bring a big dog. You hear the panting and barking of the dog very close to your face. This is one of the methods of torture and interrogation that they conducted. There are many other similar cases.
AMY GOODMAN : How long were you held like this?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] These interrogations that happened every two or three days would last for an hour, an hour and a half or two hours, in this manner. The details of the interrogations were different. In some cases, they would bring dogs, then start the interrogation. In other cases, they&#8217;d put you in a place and throw cold water or hot tea on you, then start the interrogation. But, of course, all the interrogations were conducted while you were kept naked and hooded, and they&#8217;d ask you questions to which you answer. I stayed for 40 days in a solitary cell, and 70 percent of that time I was kept naked.
AMY GOODMAN : What kind of questions did your interrogators ask you? And who were your interrogators?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] As for the interrogators, I did not know who they were. I was hooded throughout the interrogations, so I cannot identify who they were. Were they American Army personnel? Were they from outside the Army? Were they affiliated with security companies? I knew later that the security companies were involved in these interrogations. But at the moment, I was not able to identify the affiliations of the interrogators to this or that side.
As for the questions I was asked, most of them were questions relating to Al Jazeera and the details about Al Jazeera channel, details about my life. Some examples of these questions were: &quot;Will you go back to work for Al Jazeera when you get out of here?&quot; &quot;Do you like working for Al Jazeera?&quot; &quot;Why do you like working for Al Jazeera?&quot; But they did not directly charge me with any specific accusation while I stayed in this prison.
AMY GOODMAN : How were you released, Salah Hassan? How long were you held, and how did you get out?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] They held me for two months. I stayed seven or eight days before Abu Ghraib, as I mentioned before, in the other stations—in Diyala, then Salahuddin, then Abu Ghraib. So I stayed about seven days before Abu Ghraib, and the remaining days at Abu Ghraib. At the end, I was not accused of anything. They transferred me to a court. The court was formed by the Iraqi government at the time and the coalition authority, which was present in Iraq during the occupation. There was a judge. He asked a few questions. But he found that there were no charges against me, so he ordered my release, and I left Abu Ghraib prison.
AMY GOODMAN : Salah Hassan, this is the 10th anniversary of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. Did you recognize anyone in those photos? And when did you first see these pictures?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] After I was released from Abu Ghraib prison, I wrote a complete report about what happened to me in the prison and about my observations while inside the prison about psychological and physical torture and the stripping of detainees. But many people did not believe these observations. They did not believe that inside the prison such things are happening. They did not believe these details at all. But after the photographs showed up and the scandal that happened in Abu Ghraib prison broke out, many told me, &quot;You were right in your descriptions, and your details are true.&quot; Many photos were of people that I knew or saw at Abu Ghraib prison. In the famous photo of a woman in a military uniform holding a rope tied around the neck of one of the detainees, I knew that detainee and used to hear him and see him. In other photos, I did not recognize all the detainees, but have witnessed similar situations that other detainees were subjected to. When the photos showed up and the scandal broke, I saw the photos and remembered all the details and all the pains that I endured in Abu Ghraib.
AMY GOODMAN : And, Salah Hassan, what effect has this had on you—it is 10 years later—your captivity?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Often when I am asked this question, I cannot control myself, remembering all the bad memories and images very clearly. I remember all the details that happened then, as if they happened just now. It is difficult for me to forget all these details. It is difficult to overcome all these details easily. Their effect is huge, their effect on me personally, on my family, on the community where I live. There are many people who, after I got out and after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke out, asked me if any of those things happened to me. This was very embarrassing and disconcerting to me. I avoided talking to people about this issue. And truly, I have not talked about these details until after many years have passed, after some friends convinced me to share these memories to unload the burden that those details cast on me, and to get rid of some of the pains inside. But truly, they had a big effect on me that I will never be able to forget.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about your lawsuit and what you&#8217;re hoping to accomplish with it?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Truly, I believe a lot in the justice of the American judiciary system, so I was hoping that the lawsuit would be positive, or at least make a change or clarify to the American public what was happening in Abu Ghraib prison in detail. I heard that the lawsuit reached a certain stage and then stopped, but then an appeal was filed. We are now waiting for at least an acknowledgment and recognition if the lawsuit reached again the Supreme Court or the courthouse and it was ruled that what happened was wrong. This will be a huge deal for me, as at least an acknowledgment that will restore justice and affirm that we are innocent. At least I speak about myself: I am a journalist, and I am innocent, and I committed no wrong or crime. I believe that American law will do me justice.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you remain a journalist with Al Jazeera? The U.S. government, the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that—called Al Jazeera a terrorist network. It was showing the images of war in Iraq. Your thoughts about that, being a journalist, that the American soldiers knew from the beginning, what this meant for journalism?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] Truly, when I was released from Abu Ghraib prison, I resumed my work in journalism and with Al Jazeera. Until now, I work with Al Jazeera and have covered many regions—in Africa, in Asia and many other countries. I did not stop my journalistic work at all. I consider my profession a humanitarian one that shows facts and truths everywhere, whether it is in Iraq or elsewhere. Al Jazeera work in Iraq was probably different from other stations and channels because it delved into details of the issues that were related and of importance to the Iraqi people. And it showed details that other stations might have been afraid to show. This matter might have annoyed some parties, so they were not happy with the performance of Al Jazeera in Iraq because it showed many photos and details—how people were killed, how mistreatment of humans were conducted. It showed the problems that the security companies caused through attacking people. All of this was not satisfactory to the other side, so they accused Al Jazeera of not being neutral. On the contrary, Al Jazeera is objective and works diligently to broadcast truth everywhere, and nothing will stop it. You can see that many journalists of Al Jazeera are harmed because of their affiliation. But this work stays a humanitarian profession and is trying to show the truth. I am continuing on this path.
AMY GOODMAN : What is your message to the American people on this 10th anniversary of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos?
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] First, as I said, I have many American friends, and I deeply believe that the American people are good people that do not approve of such breaches. I visited the United States, and I met many people there. I observed how they treat each other. I observed how democracy functions in the U.S. Truly, it is amazing and beautiful. But what happened in Abu Ghraib prison was very different. It is not the image present in the U.S. I think that the American people know the truth now, so they should side with those who were harmed in Abu Ghraib prison. At least, those who were harmed should obtain some acknowledgment in their lawsuit and that what happened to us in Abu Ghraib was not supposed to happen. As a journalist, I think that many people realize that my case was an unfair case in Abu Ghraib. I did not commit any crime. I did not commit any professional mistake. And what happened to me in Abu Ghraib was very harmful to me and to journalism around the world.
AMY GOODMAN : Salah Hassan, thank you so much for joining us. I know this was very difficult as you relive this. Thank you for taking the time.
SALAH HASSAN : [translated] It is good that I controlled myself and did not burst into tears. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Salah Hassan Nusaif Jasim Al-Ejaili, an Al Jazeera journalist who was jailed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He spoke to us from Doha, Qatar, where he continues to work for Al Jazeera today. Special thanks to Suneela Mubayi and May Ahmar for help in translating. AMYGOODMAN: It was 10 years ago last week when CBS News first broadcast photographs of American soldiers and contractors torturing and sexually humiliating prisoners in Iraq. The New Yorker soon published a story on its website called "Torture at Abu Ghraib" by Seymour Hersh. The photos from inside the prison shocked the world. One showed a hooded Iraqi man standing on a box with his electrical wires attached to his outstretched arms. Another showed a U.S. soldier holding a leash attached to the neck of a naked prisoner. Another photograph showed a U.S. soldier giving the thumbs up while posing next to the body of a dead prisoner.

At the time, the Bush administration condemned the abuse as the work of a "few bad apples." A few low-ranking soldiers were sentenced to prison, but none of the contractors involved with running the prison were prosecuted. No high-ranking military official was held responsible, and reparations were never paid to the Iraqi prisoners.

Today we bring you the story of one former prisoner in his own words. Salah Hassan was detained in November of 2003 while working as a journalist for Al Jazeera in Iraq. He’s now a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights against the private contractor CACI International, known by many simply as CACI. According to the lawsuit, employees of CACI working at Abu Ghraib allegedly threatened Salah Hassan with dogs, deprived him of food, beat him, and kept him naked in a solitary cell in conditions of sensory deprivation. I spoke to Salah Hassan last week. He was in Doha, Qatar, where he still works for Al Jazeera. I began by asking about when he was first arrested.

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] First, I would like to thank you for giving me the chance to meet with you and discuss an issue that is 10 years old. Of course, the place where I was arrested was the district of Diyala, north of Baghdad, about 10 years ago. This was the first place of arrest. After that, I was moved from one place to another ’til I ended up in Abu Ghraib prison.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you explain, Salah, who arrested you? And then describe what happened to you at Abu Ghraib.

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Actually, it is assumed that the people who arrested me in the district of Diyala are from the American Army, but I cannot really differentiate if they are truly individuals from the Army or from private security companies, because most people there used to wear military outfits and without military ranking insignia/badges that might have clarified their affiliation to the Army or other institutions.

AMYGOODMAN: Where were you arrested? Can you talk about what you were doing at that time, and even before you made it to Abu Ghraib, where you were taken?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Of course. This is the main point of this issue. The issue is that I am a journalist, and I was at my workplace covering the events in the district of Diyala, north of Baghdad. It is my duty to cover events in the field and on the ground, as well as political events. So my arrest happened while I was doing my journalistic duty. There was an explosion in that area. I went to that place to try to take some photographs and gather information about this incident. After I was done with all this work, I was surprised that a man in a military uniform ordered my arrest. After that, I was moved from one station to another. The first of these stations was in the same district, Diyala. Then I was moved to another airport that is used as a military base, also in Diyala district. Then I was moved by helicopter, alone, to another district, which is the district of Salahuddin located north of Diyala district. Of course, I was kept in each of these stations for a day or two. And from the last station, I was moved to Abu Ghraib prison.

AMYGOODMAN: Were you hurt? Were you injured in this time by those who had captured you?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] The helicopter moved me from Diyala to Salahuddin, then from Salahuddin to Abu Ghraib by military trucks. Of course, I was subjected to a lot of hurt and harm during this period, being moved from station to station. The simplest thing was being very tightly handcuffed and having my legs restrained with metal iron chains. They also left me in tiny rooms with no food or water. They also verbally abused me throughout my detainment in all these stations.

AMYGOODMAN: Did they understand, Salah Hassan, that you were a journalist with Al Jazeera?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Of course they know I am a journalist with Al Jazeera. And their knowledge is solid since I could not have worked in the district without getting permission from the American forces that were present in the district. There was a media office, and we provided this media office with all the names of the crew, and the office gave us special permit cards for media coverage. So they do know me well. Also, I have previously worked with them, and I have previously gone to this media office more than once. There was an officer in the American forces, who was the liaison for the journalists who worked in this district. So, consequently, I was not at all a stranger to them.

AMYGOODMAN: Salah Hassan, describe what happened when you first came to Abu Ghraib.

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] The details are many, in reality. I cannot summarize it or limit it to a few short minutes. But for me as a journalist, this was a huge shock. I did not expect it at all that a journalist would be treated in this manner. I have many friends from America, and I know that the American society does not allow or accept these kinds of behavior and that this behavior would be coming from people who do not believe in democracy or who have a lot of problems. Consequently, what happened in Abu Ghraib was very difficult, an extremely big shock.

As soon as I arrived to the prison, they ordered me to strip off all my clothes. And as you know, we, in an Oriental, Eastern society, and taking off all of our clothes in the culture is a very difficult issue, which the people of this area cannot bear. This is an issue related to honor and to family and community values. This was the first issue that I was subjected to in Abu Ghraib prison. I remained without clothes, I remember, from 5:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. of the following day.

AMYGOODMAN: Was a hood placed or a plastic bag placed over your head?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Yes, I had a black hood on my head, and my hands were tied upward, and I remained in this state for long hours. I had medical issues in my stomach. Some excretion was going out of my mouth involuntarily and falling to the ground. But all of this was of no consequences to the guards in the prison. On the contrary, they were laughing. And even at midnight or after midnight, I heard some people singing, in English, of course, "Happy Birthday, Al Jazeera." The message is clear: You are with Al Jazeera, so you will celebrate your birthday here, or something of this kind.

AMYGOODMAN: Were you forced, Salah Hassan, to stand for many hours at a time, hooded, naked?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Of course. I was helpless and could not object or not comply because, as military men, they had more power than me. They forced me. At the beginning, when they asked me to take off my clothes, I refused, of course, and told them, "I will not take my clothes off." They said to me, "You either take them off yourself, or we will take them off for you." Then I realized they are serious, so I started taking off some pieces like my pants and shirt, but they insisted that I strip completely. I told them it is impossible and I cannot take off all my clothes. They said, "You either take them off, or we will." So I had to take off all my clothes, timidly, the hood on my head. I put my hand to cover my genitals, very embarrassed. These were very difficult moments. I transformed, in a second, from a journalist on the ground who has a social status and people look at me in a certain way—I have my familial and social values and status—to a humiliated person stripped down forcefully, very naked, helpless. This was a huge shock in these moments. These were the first hours of getting into the Abu Ghraib prison. And, of course, there are more details from the following days.

AMYGOODMAN: The secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, famously said in a memo, when the description of people being held for hours at a time standing, that he stands at his desk for 11 hours, he doesn’t call that torture. Could you respond to this, Salah Hassan?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Well, I can stay standing in the street for a whole day on my own volition. There is no problem there. But when I am forced to stand in this humiliating manner, without clothes, hooded and handcuffed, I believe this is a different situation. It is very different.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Salah Hassan, an Al Jazeera journalist who was jailed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. When we come back, we’ll hear more of Salah talking about how he was psychologically and physically tortured, and we’ll speak with the Center for Constitutional Rights about their lawsuit against the private contractor CACI International, or CACI. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. It was 10 years ago last week when the world first viewed the shocking photos of U.S. military personnel humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. We return now to our interview with Salah Hassan, an Al Jazeera journalist who was jailed at Abu Ghraib. I spoke with him on the 10th anniversary of the release of the photographs at his offices, his studio, in Doha, Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based. I asked Salah where he was held at Abu Ghraib and who was holding him there.

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] In the Abu Ghraib prison, there were solitary cells, probably not more than 50 or 60 cells. When I arrived to Abu Ghraib, I stayed for one day at the outdoor tent. Then, after a very brief, simple interrogation, they transferred me to one of those solitary cells. Of course, I was not able to see from my cell all the other people in the other cells, but I knew that there are other detainees, some of them arrested on charges of terrorism, some accused of civil charges. There were many.

AMYGOODMAN: Did you encounter dogs?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Throughout my detainment in the solitary cells, there was an interrogation every two or three days. During these interrogations, we were subjected to many psychological and physical torture methods. One of these methods was that you were kept naked, handcuffed, the hood on your head, then they would bring a big dog. You hear the panting and barking of the dog very close to your face. This is one of the methods of torture and interrogation that they conducted. There are many other similar cases.

AMYGOODMAN: How long were you held like this?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] These interrogations that happened every two or three days would last for an hour, an hour and a half or two hours, in this manner. The details of the interrogations were different. In some cases, they would bring dogs, then start the interrogation. In other cases, they’d put you in a place and throw cold water or hot tea on you, then start the interrogation. But, of course, all the interrogations were conducted while you were kept naked and hooded, and they’d ask you questions to which you answer. I stayed for 40 days in a solitary cell, and 70 percent of that time I was kept naked.

AMYGOODMAN: What kind of questions did your interrogators ask you? And who were your interrogators?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] As for the interrogators, I did not know who they were. I was hooded throughout the interrogations, so I cannot identify who they were. Were they American Army personnel? Were they from outside the Army? Were they affiliated with security companies? I knew later that the security companies were involved in these interrogations. But at the moment, I was not able to identify the affiliations of the interrogators to this or that side.

As for the questions I was asked, most of them were questions relating to Al Jazeera and the details about Al Jazeera channel, details about my life. Some examples of these questions were: "Will you go back to work for Al Jazeera when you get out of here?" "Do you like working for Al Jazeera?" "Why do you like working for Al Jazeera?" But they did not directly charge me with any specific accusation while I stayed in this prison.

AMYGOODMAN: How were you released, Salah Hassan? How long were you held, and how did you get out?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] They held me for two months. I stayed seven or eight days before Abu Ghraib, as I mentioned before, in the other stations—in Diyala, then Salahuddin, then Abu Ghraib. So I stayed about seven days before Abu Ghraib, and the remaining days at Abu Ghraib. At the end, I was not accused of anything. They transferred me to a court. The court was formed by the Iraqi government at the time and the coalition authority, which was present in Iraq during the occupation. There was a judge. He asked a few questions. But he found that there were no charges against me, so he ordered my release, and I left Abu Ghraib prison.

AMYGOODMAN: Salah Hassan, this is the 10th anniversary of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos. Did you recognize anyone in those photos? And when did you first see these pictures?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] After I was released from Abu Ghraib prison, I wrote a complete report about what happened to me in the prison and about my observations while inside the prison about psychological and physical torture and the stripping of detainees. But many people did not believe these observations. They did not believe that inside the prison such things are happening. They did not believe these details at all. But after the photographs showed up and the scandal that happened in Abu Ghraib prison broke out, many told me, "You were right in your descriptions, and your details are true." Many photos were of people that I knew or saw at Abu Ghraib prison. In the famous photo of a woman in a military uniform holding a rope tied around the neck of one of the detainees, I knew that detainee and used to hear him and see him. In other photos, I did not recognize all the detainees, but have witnessed similar situations that other detainees were subjected to. When the photos showed up and the scandal broke, I saw the photos and remembered all the details and all the pains that I endured in Abu Ghraib.

AMYGOODMAN: And, Salah Hassan, what effect has this had on you—it is 10 years later—your captivity?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Often when I am asked this question, I cannot control myself, remembering all the bad memories and images very clearly. I remember all the details that happened then, as if they happened just now. It is difficult for me to forget all these details. It is difficult to overcome all these details easily. Their effect is huge, their effect on me personally, on my family, on the community where I live. There are many people who, after I got out and after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke out, asked me if any of those things happened to me. This was very embarrassing and disconcerting to me. I avoided talking to people about this issue. And truly, I have not talked about these details until after many years have passed, after some friends convinced me to share these memories to unload the burden that those details cast on me, and to get rid of some of the pains inside. But truly, they had a big effect on me that I will never be able to forget.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about your lawsuit and what you’re hoping to accomplish with it?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Truly, I believe a lot in the justice of the American judiciary system, so I was hoping that the lawsuit would be positive, or at least make a change or clarify to the American public what was happening in Abu Ghraib prison in detail. I heard that the lawsuit reached a certain stage and then stopped, but then an appeal was filed. We are now waiting for at least an acknowledgment and recognition if the lawsuit reached again the Supreme Court or the courthouse and it was ruled that what happened was wrong. This will be a huge deal for me, as at least an acknowledgment that will restore justice and affirm that we are innocent. At least I speak about myself: I am a journalist, and I am innocent, and I committed no wrong or crime. I believe that American law will do me justice.

AMYGOODMAN: Did you remain a journalist with Al Jazeera? The U.S. government, the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that—called Al Jazeera a terrorist network. It was showing the images of war in Iraq. Your thoughts about that, being a journalist, that the American soldiers knew from the beginning, what this meant for journalism?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] Truly, when I was released from Abu Ghraib prison, I resumed my work in journalism and with Al Jazeera. Until now, I work with Al Jazeera and have covered many regions—in Africa, in Asia and many other countries. I did not stop my journalistic work at all. I consider my profession a humanitarian one that shows facts and truths everywhere, whether it is in Iraq or elsewhere. Al Jazeera work in Iraq was probably different from other stations and channels because it delved into details of the issues that were related and of importance to the Iraqi people. And it showed details that other stations might have been afraid to show. This matter might have annoyed some parties, so they were not happy with the performance of Al Jazeera in Iraq because it showed many photos and details—how people were killed, how mistreatment of humans were conducted. It showed the problems that the security companies caused through attacking people. All of this was not satisfactory to the other side, so they accused Al Jazeera of not being neutral. On the contrary, Al Jazeera is objective and works diligently to broadcast truth everywhere, and nothing will stop it. You can see that many journalists of Al Jazeera are harmed because of their affiliation. But this work stays a humanitarian profession and is trying to show the truth. I am continuing on this path.

AMYGOODMAN: What is your message to the American people on this 10th anniversary of the release of the Abu Ghraib photos?

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] First, as I said, I have many American friends, and I deeply believe that the American people are good people that do not approve of such breaches. I visited the United States, and I met many people there. I observed how they treat each other. I observed how democracy functions in the U.S. Truly, it is amazing and beautiful. But what happened in Abu Ghraib prison was very different. It is not the image present in the U.S. I think that the American people know the truth now, so they should side with those who were harmed in Abu Ghraib prison. At least, those who were harmed should obtain some acknowledgment in their lawsuit and that what happened to us in Abu Ghraib was not supposed to happen. As a journalist, I think that many people realize that my case was an unfair case in Abu Ghraib. I did not commit any crime. I did not commit any professional mistake. And what happened to me in Abu Ghraib was very harmful to me and to journalism around the world.

AMYGOODMAN: Salah Hassan, thank you so much for joining us. I know this was very difficult as you relive this. Thank you for taking the time.

SALAHHASSAN: [translated] It is good that I controlled myself and did not burst into tears. Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Salah Hassan Nusaif Jasim Al-Ejaili, an Al Jazeera journalist who was jailed at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He spoke to us from Doha, Qatar, where he continues to work for Al Jazeera today. Special thanks to Suneela Mubayi and May Ahmar for help in translating.

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Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00:00 -040010 Years After Abu Ghraib, Ex-Prisoners Seek Justice in Torture Lawsuit Against U.S. Contractor CACIhttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/5/5/10_years_after_abu_ghraib_ex
tag:democracynow.org,2014-05-05:en/story/bd4e51 AMY GOODMAN : For more, we&#8217;re joined by Salah Hassan&#8217;s attorney, Baher Azmy. He is the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the Abu Ghraib lawsuit. Baher Azmy, thank you so much for being with us. Explain this lawsuit that you have.
BAHER AZMY : After—in 2004, after military investigative reports revealed the role of private military contractors in the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, we actually, with other lawyers, brought three lawsuits against two sets of private military contractors—one on behalf of 256 victims in—which was dismissed by a court of appeals in Washington, a second one against a company called L-3 Services that provided translation services to the U.S. military, and that was brought in Maryland, and that settled on behalf of 71. And this last lawsuit on behalf of Salah and three other victims of torture at the Abu Ghraib hard site against a private military contractor called CACI International, CACI , which provided interrogation services for the U.S. government. And the allegations there, which are based on our own investigation and conclusions of military investigators, is that CACI employees played a central role in the torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib by ordering low-level military military employees to soften up detainees for eventual interrogation by CACI employees. So this lawsuit seeks to hold CACI , the corporate entity, responsible for the actions of its employees.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to turn to the Kiobel case. In 2012, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether corporations can be sued in U.S. courts for human rights abuses committed overseas. That case is called Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum . We spoke to Marco Simons , legal director of EarthRights International, who explained the case&#8217;s significance.
MARCO SIMONS : Yeah, so this case is really about whether a corporation that participates in serious human rights abuses, such as crimes against humanity or genocide or state-sponsored torture, can profit from those abuses and shield those profits from the victims when the victims come to take them to court. It&#8217;s essentially about whether corporations are immune from any kind of liability for serious human rights abuses worldwide. And that&#8217;s what the court of appeals held in this case. They said under no circumstances can a corporation ever be sued for the most serious human rights violations today.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s Marco Simons talking about Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Simons is legal director of EarthRights. Can you talk about the significance of this case?
BAHER AZMY : Yeah, so, Kiobel appeared to present the possibility that corporations would be immune for liability under this Alien Tort Statute. But the court pivoted a little bit and instead limited the Alien Tort Statute in a different way, by suggesting that when all of the aspects of the legal claim occur abroad, extraterritorially, courts should not hear those cases. In Kiobel , you had Nigerian plaintiffs, British and Dutch corporations, who alleged that there were crimes against humanity and torture committed in Nigeria, so there were no connections to the United States. And in our case, the district court nevertheless dismissed our case on a kind of narrow—a formalistic reading of the Kiobel decision. But our position in the court of appeals, which recently heard our appeal, is that the Supreme Court recognized that when there are connections to the United States, such as here, where you have a U.S. corporation who entered into contract with the U.S. government and conspired with U.S. military personnel in a U.S.-run prison, the connections to the United States are so strong that U.S. courts have to provide a remedy to foreign nationals for international law violations.
AMY GOODMAN : Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed he first learned of the extent of the Abu Ghraib abuse after the photographs were made public. This is what he told Congress after the scandal broke in May of 2004.
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE DONALD RUMSFELD : It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn&#8217;t say, &quot;Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something to manage the&quot;—the legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn&#8217;t proceeding along fine is the fact that the president didn&#8217;t know and you didn&#8217;t know and I didn&#8217;t know. And the—as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Who has been held accountable for what happened at Abu Ghraib?
BAHER AZMY : Very few people, just a number of low-level military employees, like Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick and some others, who were court-martialed for their role in Abu Ghraib, but no high-level officials. And this suit seeks to hold responsible the corporate entities that conspired with those who were court-martialed and, in some cases, ordered them to undertake the abuse. And that&#8217;s a very important feature of this story, the legacy of Abu Ghraib.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, how does Salah&#8217;s treatment compare to the other prisoners that you&#8217;re representing in this suit?
BAHER AZMY : It&#8217;s representative. All of them endured forced nudity. A number of the others endured also electric shocks and sleep deprivation and all forms of sexual humiliation, attacks by guards, physical abuse, a whole constellation of serious mistreatment.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to ask you more about the role of CACI International, as they call themselves—others refer to them as CACI—in Abu Ghraib. First, though, I wanted to go to a clip of the group&#8217;s—of the company&#8217;s promotional video.
CACI INTERNATIONAL PROMOTIONAL VIDEO : Character. It&#8217;s the unique set of moral and ethical qualities that defines who we are. CACI is built on a foundation of character. For 50 years, our defense, homeland security, intelligence and federal civilian customers have depended on CACI for world-leading information solutions. They count on us for our character—honesty, integrity, commitment, respect. Character, it defines who we are.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s an ad from CACI , or CACI . Baher Azmy of CCR ?
BAHER AZMY : Well, you know, I don&#8217;t have any specific information upon which, you know, they base their claims to sort of ethical behavior. I think a feature of character and sort of ethical behavior would be taking responsibility for the conduct of its employees in Abu Ghraib.
AMY GOODMAN : And what exactly did they do?
BAHER AZMY : Well, so one other—you know, one other data point we have about CACI is, after they successfully dismissed the lawsuit in the trial court, they sought to impose costs against our four torture victims. So, you know, given the massive economic disparity—a multibillion-dollar corporation on the one hand, and four torture victims, three of whom are clearly indigent—that suggests the purpose was simply to deter and intimidate our plaintiffs and other human rights victims from seeking accountability in U.S. courts.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. In 2004, he broke the story about the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Then, in 2010, he revealed U.S. forces were carrying out battlefield executions of prisoners in Afghanistan. This is Hersh speaking during a discussion at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva.
SEYMOUR HERSH : And the purpose of my stories was to take it out of the field into the White House, and where it—you know, it&#8217;s not that the president or the secretary of defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, or Bush or Cheney—it&#8217;s not that they knew what happened in Abu Ghraib; it&#8217;s that they had allowed this kind of activity to happen. And I&#8217;ll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners—I mean, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They&#8217;re being executed in the battlefield. It&#8217;s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn&#8217;t get—necessarily get reported. And things don&#8217;t change.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, Seymour Hersh, and then went on to expose in The New Yorker magazine these photographs of Abu Ghraib, and last week was the 10-[year] anniversary of that exposé.
BAHER AZMY : Well, he brings up a very important point, even about the current administration, which is the lack of accountability across the board for serious human rights violations by current administration officials and former administration officials in Abu Ghraib, in Guantánamo, in Bagram, Kandahar, in secret detention sites. The failure for the Obama administration to seek any kind of meaningful accountability, criminal or civil, is, I think, a deep stain on Obama&#8217;s legacy and a critical mistake, as it permits the possibility of repeat conduct and impunity.
AMY GOODMAN : So, what makes you think your case can move forward, since it was dismissed by a lower court?
BAHER AZMY : Well, we&#8217;ve—recently, a court of appeals has heard our appeal in Richmond, Virginia. And I think the fact that there are such strong U.S. connections to the torture here, and because the core purpose of the human rights statute we&#8217;re relying on, the Alien Tort Statute, is to provide a remedy when U.S. subjects commit international law violations, we&#8217;re hopeful that the court of appeals will reinstate the case.
AMY GOODMAN : And the issue of the prisoners having to pay the defense costs?
BAHER AZMY : That&#8217;s also on appeal, and we&#8217;re hopeful that that will get reversed, as well, when the court reinstates the case.
AMY GOODMAN : If it didn&#8217;t get reversed, what happens? How do these men who were formerly imprisoned at Abu Ghraib pay CACI ?
BAHER AZMY : Well, they likely can&#8217;t pay CACI . They don&#8217;t have that kind of money. And so, it remains to be seen what CACI would want to do. But I think—I think their goal here is to send a signal to other people that not only will we not claim responsibility for allegedly unlawful behavior, we&#8217;re going to impose costs on you trying to hold us accountable for it.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Baher Azmy, I want to thank you for being here to talk about this case, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the Abu Ghraib lawsuit called Al Shimari v. CACI , et al. But I&#8217;d like to ask you to stay. When we come back, we&#8217;re going to continue to talk about the issue of accountability and the Iraq War with a protest leader at Rutgers University. Condoleezza Rice has just backed out of giving the graduation address at Rutgers because of the protests that took place. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by Salah Hassan’s attorney, Baher Azmy. He is the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the Abu Ghraib lawsuit. Baher Azmy, thank you so much for being with us. Explain this lawsuit that you have.

BAHERAZMY: After—in 2004, after military investigative reports revealed the role of private military contractors in the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, we actually, with other lawyers, brought three lawsuits against two sets of private military contractors—one on behalf of 256 victims in—which was dismissed by a court of appeals in Washington, a second one against a company called L-3 Services that provided translation services to the U.S. military, and that was brought in Maryland, and that settled on behalf of 71. And this last lawsuit on behalf of Salah and three other victims of torture at the Abu Ghraib hard site against a private military contractor called CACI International, CACI, which provided interrogation services for the U.S. government. And the allegations there, which are based on our own investigation and conclusions of military investigators, is that CACI employees played a central role in the torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib by ordering low-level military military employees to soften up detainees for eventual interrogation by CACI employees. So this lawsuit seeks to hold CACI, the corporate entity, responsible for the actions of its employees.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the Kiobel case. In 2012, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on whether corporations can be sued in U.S. courts for human rights abuses committed overseas. That case is called Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum. We spoke to Marco Simons, legal director of EarthRights International, who explained the case’s significance.

MARCOSIMONS: Yeah, so this case is really about whether a corporation that participates in serious human rights abuses, such as crimes against humanity or genocide or state-sponsored torture, can profit from those abuses and shield those profits from the victims when the victims come to take them to court. It’s essentially about whether corporations are immune from any kind of liability for serious human rights abuses worldwide. And that’s what the court of appeals held in this case. They said under no circumstances can a corporation ever be sued for the most serious human rights violations today.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Marco Simons talking about Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Simons is legal director of EarthRights. Can you talk about the significance of this case?

BAHERAZMY: Yeah, so, Kiobel appeared to present the possibility that corporations would be immune for liability under this Alien Tort Statute. But the court pivoted a little bit and instead limited the Alien Tort Statute in a different way, by suggesting that when all of the aspects of the legal claim occur abroad, extraterritorially, courts should not hear those cases. In Kiobel, you had Nigerian plaintiffs, British and Dutch corporations, who alleged that there were crimes against humanity and torture committed in Nigeria, so there were no connections to the United States. And in our case, the district court nevertheless dismissed our case on a kind of narrow—a formalistic reading of the Kiobel decision. But our position in the court of appeals, which recently heard our appeal, is that the Supreme Court recognized that when there are connections to the United States, such as here, where you have a U.S. corporation who entered into contract with the U.S. government and conspired with U.S. military personnel in a U.S.-run prison, the connections to the United States are so strong that U.S. courts have to provide a remedy to foreign nationals for international law violations.

AMYGOODMAN: Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed he first learned of the extent of the Abu Ghraib abuse after the photographs were made public. This is what he told Congress after the scandal broke in May of 2004.

SECRETARY OF DEFENSEDONALDRUMSFELD: It breaks our hearts that in fact someone didn’t say, "Wait, look, this is terrible. We need to do something to manage the"—the legal part of it was proceeding along fine. What wasn’t proceeding along fine is the fact that the president didn’t know and you didn’t know and I didn’t know. And the—as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Who has been held accountable for what happened at Abu Ghraib?

BAHERAZMY: Very few people, just a number of low-level military employees, like Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick and some others, who were court-martialed for their role in Abu Ghraib, but no high-level officials. And this suit seeks to hold responsible the corporate entities that conspired with those who were court-martialed and, in some cases, ordered them to undertake the abuse. And that’s a very important feature of this story, the legacy of Abu Ghraib.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, how does Salah’s treatment compare to the other prisoners that you’re representing in this suit?

BAHERAZMY: It’s representative. All of them endured forced nudity. A number of the others endured also electric shocks and sleep deprivation and all forms of sexual humiliation, attacks by guards, physical abuse, a whole constellation of serious mistreatment.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to ask you more about the role of CACI International, as they call themselves—others refer to them as CACI—in Abu Ghraib. First, though, I wanted to go to a clip of the group’s—of the company’s promotional video.

CACIINTERNATIONALPROMOTIONALVIDEO: Character. It’s the unique set of moral and ethical qualities that defines who we are. CACI is built on a foundation of character. For 50 years, our defense, homeland security, intelligence and federal civilian customers have depended on CACI for world-leading information solutions. They count on us for our character—honesty, integrity, commitment, respect. Character, it defines who we are.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s an ad from CACI, or CACI. Baher Azmy of CCR?

BAHERAZMY: Well, you know, I don’t have any specific information upon which, you know, they base their claims to sort of ethical behavior. I think a feature of character and sort of ethical behavior would be taking responsibility for the conduct of its employees in Abu Ghraib.

AMYGOODMAN: And what exactly did they do?

BAHERAZMY: Well, so one other—you know, one other data point we have about CACI is, after they successfully dismissed the lawsuit in the trial court, they sought to impose costs against our four torture victims. So, you know, given the massive economic disparity—a multibillion-dollar corporation on the one hand, and four torture victims, three of whom are clearly indigent—that suggests the purpose was simply to deter and intimidate our plaintiffs and other human rights victims from seeking accountability in U.S. courts.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. In 2004, he broke the story about the abuse and torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Then, in 2010, he revealed U.S. forces were carrying out battlefield executions of prisoners in Afghanistan. This is Hersh speaking during a discussion at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Geneva.

SEYMOURHERSH: And the purpose of my stories was to take it out of the field into the White House, and where it—you know, it’s not that the president or the secretary of defense, Mr. Rumsfeld, or Bush or Cheney—it’s not that they knew what happened in Abu Ghraib; it’s that they had allowed this kind of activity to happen. And I’ll tell you right now, one of the great tragedies of my country is that Mr. Obama is looking the other way, because equally horrible things are happening to prisoners—I mean, to those we capture in Afghanistan. They’re being executed in the battlefield. It’s unbelievable stuff going on there that doesn’t get—necessarily get reported. And things don’t change.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam, Seymour Hersh, and then went on to expose in The New Yorker magazine these photographs of Abu Ghraib, and last week was the 10-[year] anniversary of that exposé.

BAHERAZMY: Well, he brings up a very important point, even about the current administration, which is the lack of accountability across the board for serious human rights violations by current administration officials and former administration officials in Abu Ghraib, in Guantánamo, in Bagram, Kandahar, in secret detention sites. The failure for the Obama administration to seek any kind of meaningful accountability, criminal or civil, is, I think, a deep stain on Obama’s legacy and a critical mistake, as it permits the possibility of repeat conduct and impunity.

AMYGOODMAN: So, what makes you think your case can move forward, since it was dismissed by a lower court?

BAHERAZMY: Well, we’ve—recently, a court of appeals has heard our appeal in Richmond, Virginia. And I think the fact that there are such strong U.S. connections to the torture here, and because the core purpose of the human rights statute we’re relying on, the Alien Tort Statute, is to provide a remedy when U.S. subjects commit international law violations, we’re hopeful that the court of appeals will reinstate the case.

AMYGOODMAN: And the issue of the prisoners having to pay the defense costs?

BAHERAZMY: That’s also on appeal, and we’re hopeful that that will get reversed, as well, when the court reinstates the case.

AMYGOODMAN: If it didn’t get reversed, what happens? How do these men who were formerly imprisoned at Abu Ghraib pay CACI?

BAHERAZMY: Well, they likely can’t pay CACI. They don’t have that kind of money. And so, it remains to be seen what CACI would want to do. But I think—I think their goal here is to send a signal to other people that not only will we not claim responsibility for allegedly unlawful behavior, we’re going to impose costs on you trying to hold us accountable for it.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Baher Azmy, I want to thank you for being here to talk about this case, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the Abu Ghraib lawsuit called Al Shimari v. CACI, et al. But I’d like to ask you to stay. When we come back, we’re going to continue to talk about the issue of accountability and the Iraq War with a protest leader at Rutgers University. Condoleezza Rice has just backed out of giving the graduation address at Rutgers because of the protests that took place. Stay with us.

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Mon, 05 May 2014 00:00:00 -0400The Unknown Known: Errol Morris' New Doc Tackles Unrepentant Iraq War Architect Donald Rumsfeldhttp://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/27/the_unknown_known_errol_morris_new
tag:democracynow.org,2014-03-27:en/story/2a8f98 AMY GOODMAN : Excerpts of &quot;The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld,&quot; a song cycle of actual Rumsfeld quotes by composer Bryant Kong and vocalist Elender Wall. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, this month marks 11 years since the United States invaded Iraq, and the legacy of that invasion is staggering. At least half a million Iraqis are dead, along with at least 4,400 American soldiers. Thousands of civilians and soldiers have been left maimed and continue to suffer from mental trauma. One Harvard study estimates the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined will cost the United States as much as $6 trillion.
Well, we spend the rest of the hour looking at a key architect of the Iraq War: former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He&#8217;s the focus of a new documentary by Oscar-winning director Errol Morris called The Unknown Known . The title refers to an infamous press briefing in 2002 when Rumsfeld faced questions from reporters about the lack of evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This is the trailer.
ERROL MORRIS : Let me put up this next memo.
DONALD RUMSFELD : You want me to read this?
ERROL MORRIS : Yes, please.
DONALD RUMSFELD : &quot;All generalizations are false, including this one.&quot; There it is.
NEWS ANCHOR 1: Rumsfeld survived Watergate with reputation intact.
NEWS ANCHOR 2: Possible vice-presidential running mate with President Ford.
NEWS ANCHOR 3: Questions about Rumsfeld are whether he&#8217;s too ambitious playing second fiddle to Reagan.
DONALD RUMSFELD : The credit belongs to people who are carped at and criticized and said, &quot;Oh, my goodness, you&#8217;re warmongers.&quot; And we need to understand how we got to where we are. Who do we want to provide leadership in the world? Somebody else?
ERROL MORRIS : When Shakespeare wrote history, the motivating force was character defects, jealousies, etc., etc., etc. Maybe Shakespeare got it wrong.
DONALD RUMSFELD : Maybe he had it right.
Governor Reagan decided to have George Bush to be vice president.
ERROL MORRIS : It seems to me that if that decision had gone a slightly different way, you would have been future president of the United States.
DONALD RUMSFELD : That&#8217;s possible.
ERROL MORRIS : How do you think that they got away with 9/11? It seems amazing, in retrospect.
DONALD RUMSFELD : Everything seems amazing in retrospect.
Stuff happens. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They&#8217;re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And you have to pick and choose. Well, to the extent you pick and choose and you&#8217;re wrong, the penalty can be enormous.
Subject, unknown knowns. That is to say, things that you think you know, that it turns out you did not.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s the trailer for the new documentary, The Unknown Known . Its director, Errol Morris, joins us now. This is the 10th documentary feature he has made. He won an Oscar for Best Documentary for his film Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara , which is about another secretary of defense, this time in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His other films include Standard Operating Procedure , about alleged U.S. torture of terror suspects at Abu Ghraib, and The Thin Blue Line , about the wrongful conviction of Randall Adams for the murder of a Dallas policeman, the movie credited with leading to Adams&#8217; exoneration. Film critic Roger Ebert called Morris&#8217;s first film, Gates of Heaven , about the pet cemetery business, one of the 10 best films of all time. He was also one an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated film, The Act of Killing . Errol Morris is a regular contributor to The New York Times opinion pages, where he is currently in the middle of a four-part series titled &quot;The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld.&quot;
Errol Morris, welcome to Democracy Now! Why Donald Rumsfeld? Why did you choose him to be your subject of this film?
ERROL MORRIS : Things take on a logic of their own. I had made The Fog of War about Robert S. McNamara, a central figure, for me, as a young man, because of the war in Vietnam, one of the great disasters in American history. And I made the movie because of questions about that war. How did we get into such an incredible mess? Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers dead, millions of people in Southeast Asia dead. Call it the salt-and-pepper shakers or the bookends, but another disastrous war, another secretary of defense, and I decided that I wanted to do it again. Also, I had made a movie about Abu Ghraib, so there are a whole number of issues which are of great interest to me.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But the interesting thing is McNamara was sort of the reluctant warmonger, whereas Rumsfeld, in your film, is so certain about everything that he does. How did you first get him to agree to sit down, not just for an hour or two hours, for 33 hours of interviews, and to reveal so much about his own thoughts to you?
ERROL MORRIS : The simplest answer is because he wanted to. He wanted to explain himself. He wanted to provide an account of what he had done. Very early on, our first meeting—
AMY GOODMAN : Did he call you, or you call him?
ERROL MORRIS : I called him. I sent him a copy of The Fog of War in a letter. And I was told by his lawyer, Bob Barnett, that he would never, ever, ever speak to me. He said, &quot;Forget about it. This is never going to happen.&quot; But he did call me. I went to Washington. We met. And this film is the result.
AMY GOODMAN : In that trailer we just played, he talked about the possibility of having become president. How would that have happened?
ERROL MORRIS : Could have happened in a whole number of different ways. He was extraordinarily successful at a very young age—four-term congressman from Illinois and then a whole number of Cabinet-level appointments in the Nixon administration.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: He was the youngest secretary of defense in the history of the country, right?
ERROL MORRIS : Eventually, in the Ford administration, one of the youngest chiefs of staff, if not the youngest, before his assistant, Richard Cheney, took his place, and then the youngest secretary of defense. He has that distinction of being the youngest and the oldest secretary of defense, first time around for Ford and, of course, second time around for George W. Bush.
AMY GOODMAN : He wrote like 20,000 memos?
ERROL MORRIS : They were called &quot;snowflakes,&quot; because there were so many of them, probably more—
AMY GOODMAN : And they were on white paper.
ERROL MORRIS : Probably more than 20,000.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to turn back to the film, Unknown Known .
ERROL MORRIS : How about &quot;a lot&quot;? We&#8217;ll call them—he wrote a lot.
AMY GOODMAN : Donald Rumsfeld talking about those memos that he wrote on Iraq.
DONALD RUMSFELD : If you look at the range of my memos, there might be one-tenth of 1 percent about Iraq. The reason I was concerned about Iraq is because four-star generals would come to me and say, &quot;Mr. Secretary, we have a problem. Our orders are to fly over the northern part of Iraq and the southern part of Iraq on a daily basis with the Brits, and we are getting shot at. At some moment—could be tomorrow, could be next month, could be next year—one of our planes is going to be shot down, and our pilots and crews are going to be killed, or they&#8217;re going to be captured. The question will be: What in the world were we flying those flights for? What was the cost-benefit ratio? What was our country gaining?&quot; So you sit down, and you say, &quot;I think I&#8217;m going to see if I can get the president&#8217;s attention, remind him that our planes are being shot at, remind him that we don&#8217;t have a fresh policy for Iraq, and remind him that we&#8217;ve got a whole range of options&quot;—not an obsession, a very measured, nuanced approach.
AMY GOODMAN : That&#8217;s Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known . Our guest, the Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris. We&#8217;ll be back with him in a moment.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : Our guest this half of the show is Errol Morris, the director of the new documentary, The Unknown Known . He has won an Oscar for Best Documentary for his film The Fog of War . That was Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara . This film is about Donald Rumsfeld. I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in this clip from The Unknown Known , our guest, Errol Morris, asks Rumsfeld about the torture memos that authorized techniques such as waterboarding against prisoners captured by the United States.
ERROL MORRIS : What about all these so-called torture memos?
DONALD RUMSFELD : Well, there were what? One or two or three. I don&#8217;t know the number, but there were not all of these so-called memos. They were mischaracterized as torture memos, and they came not out of the Bush administration, per se ; they came out of the U.S. Department of Justice, blessed by the attorney general, the senior legal official of the United States of America, having been nominated by a president and confirmed by the United States Senate overwhelmingly. Little different cast I just put on it than the one you did. I&#8217;ll chalk that one up.
ERROL MORRIS : Was the reaction unfair?
DONALD RUMSFELD : Well, I&#8217;ve never read them.
ERROL MORRIS : Really?
DONALD RUMSFELD : No. I&#8217;m not a lawyer. What would I know?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Errol Morris, talk to us about that exchange you had with him.
ERROL MORRIS : Strange, looking at the clips, even here. They&#8217;re clips, of course, that I&#8217;m more than familiar with, having spent so much time with Donald Rumsfeld and having spent so much time edited this movie. Things surprised me in the interview and still surprise me. Someone asked me, &quot;Is he completely insincere?&quot; And I said, &quot;No, the problem is he&#8217;s completely sincere.&quot; When he tells you he never read those torture memos, I don&#8217;t think he did. When he reads the laundry list of enhanced interrogation techniques, a.k.a. torture, he himself seems surprised by what he&#8217;s reading, as if he had never really carefully read them before. He suddenly says, &quot;Good grief, that&#8217;s a pile of stuff.&quot; There&#8217;s this odd disconnection between these policies and what he thinks he&#8217;s doing.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about his—there are two things that struck me in the film. One is his periodic smile, that this—
ERROL MORRIS : The grin.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The grin of complete certainty about everything that he&#8217;s saying. And then the other thing is his relationship to language and his use of language. It&#8217;s certainly—he always seems to believe he has a better command of the answers than—clearly, than anyone asking him the questions.
ERROL MORRIS : I would put it differently. Orwell, George Orwell, wrote about how language could be used by people in power to control others. Often, I think this is a new twist on the story. He&#8217;s controlling others, hiding things from others, and also hiding things from himself. The end of the story, he retreats into a kind of strange Looney Tunes world of language, where he thinks if he can just find the right set of words, everything will be OK.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to—
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, but I just want to ask him about that grin, the smile. Your sense of it?
ERROL MORRIS : My wife calls him the Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland . Alice says about the cat, &quot;I&#8217;ve often seen a cat without a grin; I&#8217;ve never seen a grin without a cat.&quot; It&#8217;s this strange, disembodied grin almost, this look of self-satisfaction, of pleasure, the cat that swallowed the canary. This is one of the strangest and most disturbing interviews I&#8217;ve ever done.
AMY GOODMAN : Of those tens of thousands of memos, what most shocked you? I mean, you&#8217;re bringing us, as you did with Fog of War , the war—then Vietnam, now Iraq—from the perspective of the person who&#8217;s running that war, or one of them.
ERROL MORRIS : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Of course, the question is: What about at the target end? Do you have a desire to make a film from a victim&#8217;s perspective?
ERROL MORRIS : I had a desire to make a very specific kind of film. I call it history from the inside out. This was also true of McNamara, Fog of War . How do they see the world? The memos, the oral history is a way in. I didn&#8217;t interview 15, 20 people. I interviewed one person.
AMY GOODMAN : Though you did interview many people; you just used one in the film, right, around this film, asking them their thoughts about Rumsfeld?
ERROL MORRIS : I interviewed only one person on camera. I actually interviewed two people on camera, but I knew I wasn&#8217;t using the second interview. It was an interview with his wife Joyce, who I very much liked.
But you asked me a question about whether there was one memo among these tens of thousands of memos that stood out among others. And I would say, yes, the most disturbing of the disturbing memos, of Rumsfeld&#8217;s greatest hits. Here&#8217;s a man of slogans and epithets and rules, etc., etc., etc. &quot;Weakness is provocative.&quot; &quot;Pearl Harbor is a failure of the imagination.&quot; But the most nefarious of them is: &quot;Absence of evidence isn&#8217;t evidence of absence.&quot; And he said this to—guess who—the president of the United States. I see him reading this memo. Where does it come from? From the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was used by the British astronomer Martin Rees and by Carl Sagan. We&#8217;re looking for intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. Universe is a very big place. We haven&#8217;t found evidence, but that doesn&#8217;t mean that they&#8217;re not out there. Absence of evidence isn&#8217;t evidence of absence.
AMY GOODMAN : And, of course, he&#8217;s talking about weapons of mass destruction.
ERROL MORRIS : This gets transferred over to—guess where—Iraq.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: One of the—I want to play an exchange—
ERROL MORRIS : Where it makes no sense, I might add.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to play an exchange from the Pentagon briefing in 2002, the infamous briefing when Rumsfeld first described his ideas about the known unknown to the public. He was questioned by NBC&#8217;s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski.
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI : Could I follow up, Mr. Secretary, on what you just said, please? In regard to Iraq, weapons of mass destruction—weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD : The reports that say there&#8217;s—that something hasn&#8217;t happened are always interesting to me, because, as we know, there are known knowns—there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don&#8217;t know we don&#8217;t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. And so, people who have the omniscience that they can say with high certainty that something has not happened, or is not being tried, have capabilities that are—what was the word you used, Pam, earlier?
PAM HESS : Free associate?
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD : Yeah, they can—they can do things I can&#8217;t do. Barbara?
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI : Excuse me, but is this an unknown unknown?
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD : I&#8217;m not—
JIM MIKLASZEWSKI : There&#8217;s several unknowns, and I&#8217;m just wondering if this is an unknown unknown.
DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD RUMSFELD : I&#8217;m not—I&#8217;m not going—I&#8217;m not going to say which it is.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Rumsfeld back in 2002. But Donald Rumsfeld has been back in the news this week. During an appearance on Fox News, he said a trained ape could do a better job in Afghanistan than President Obama.
DONALD RUMSFELD : Yeah, our relationship with Karzai and with Afghanistan was absolutely first rate in the Bush administration. It has gone downhill like a toboggan ever since the Obama administration came in. Now, take for example the fact that we have status of forces agreement probably with 100, 125 countries in the world. This administration, the White House and the State Department, have failed to get a status of forces agreement. A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement. It does not take a genius.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Errol Morris, your reaction to this latest statement by Don Rumsfeld?
ERROL MORRIS : Horrified. We all know that the various officials of the Bush administration, George W. Bush himself, will never be held accountable for most, if not all, of the things that happened under their watch. They can now sit back and crow about one thing or another and indulge in one form of partisan politics after another. Maybe that&#8217;s the most disturbing thing about this story. If they took us to war for no good reason, shouldn&#8217;t they be in some way held accountable for that fact? Isn&#8217;t that important to our democracy, that we just don&#8217;t simply sweep the past under the rug, that we deal with it in some fashion?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, interestingly, in your interview with Rumsfeld, one of the—one of the mistakes he believes he made was not resigning after the Abu Ghraib revelations, even though he hastens to add that it was overblown as a systemic problem rather than a problem with a few guys, a few bad apples in the military on a night shift.
ERROL MORRIS : He tendered two resignations, neither of which were accepted by the president. He often wants to have it both ways. He will provide some gesture suggesting that he takes complete responsibility and on the other hand take none.
AMY GOODMAN : Does he ever apologize?
ERROL MORRIS : That word is not really part of his lexicon. No, there are no apologies.
AMY GOODMAN : What most shocked you in your 33 hours of conversation with Donald Rumsfeld?
ERROL MORRIS : So many things. The fact that he unendingly says things which are not true, about—he unendingly says things that are false. Does he even realize it?
AMY GOODMAN : So you say he lies throughout?
ERROL MORRIS : Lying—
AMY GOODMAN : We have two seconds.
ERROL MORRIS : —depends on a conscious element. Who the hell knows what&#8217;s going on upstairs. I most certainly don&#8217;t.
AMY GOODMAN : Errol Morris, I want to thank you for being with us, the director of the new documentary, The Unknown Known . It opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 2nd. AMYGOODMAN: Excerpts of "The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld," a song cycle of actual Rumsfeld quotes by composer Bryant Kong and vocalist Elender Wall. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, this month marks 11 years since the United States invaded Iraq, and the legacy of that invasion is staggering. At least half a million Iraqis are dead, along with at least 4,400 American soldiers. Thousands of civilians and soldiers have been left maimed and continue to suffer from mental trauma. One Harvard study estimates the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined will cost the United States as much as $6 trillion.

Well, we spend the rest of the hour looking at a key architect of the Iraq War: former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He’s the focus of a new documentary by Oscar-winning director Errol Morris called The Unknown Known. The title refers to an infamous press briefing in 2002 when Rumsfeld faced questions from reporters about the lack of evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. This is the trailer.

ERROLMORRIS: Let me put up this next memo.

DONALDRUMSFELD: You want me to read this?

ERROLMORRIS: Yes, please.

DONALDRUMSFELD: "All generalizations are false, including this one." There it is.

NEWSANCHOR 3: Questions about Rumsfeld are whether he’s too ambitious playing second fiddle to Reagan.

DONALDRUMSFELD: The credit belongs to people who are carped at and criticized and said, "Oh, my goodness, you’re warmongers." And we need to understand how we got to where we are. Who do we want to provide leadership in the world? Somebody else?

ERROLMORRIS: When Shakespeare wrote history, the motivating force was character defects, jealousies, etc., etc., etc. Maybe Shakespeare got it wrong.

DONALDRUMSFELD: Maybe he had it right.

Governor Reagan decided to have George Bush to be vice president.

ERROLMORRIS: It seems to me that if that decision had gone a slightly different way, you would have been future president of the United States.

DONALDRUMSFELD: That’s possible.

ERROLMORRIS: How do you think that they got away with 9/11? It seems amazing, in retrospect.

DONALDRUMSFELD: Everything seems amazing in retrospect.

Stuff happens. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They’re also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. And you have to pick and choose. Well, to the extent you pick and choose and you’re wrong, the penalty can be enormous.

Subject, unknown knowns. That is to say, things that you think you know, that it turns out you did not.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the new documentary, The Unknown Known. Its director, Errol Morris, joins us now. This is the 10th documentary feature he has made. He won an Oscar for Best Documentary for his film Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, which is about another secretary of defense, this time in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. His other films include Standard Operating Procedure, about alleged U.S. torture of terror suspects at Abu Ghraib, and The Thin Blue Line, about the wrongful conviction of Randall Adams for the murder of a Dallas policeman, the movie credited with leading to Adams’ exoneration. Film critic Roger Ebert called Morris’s first film, Gates of Heaven, about the pet cemetery business, one of the 10 best films of all time. He was also one an executive producer of the Oscar-nominated film, The Act of Killing. Errol Morris is a regular contributor to The New York Times opinion pages, where he is currently in the middle of a four-part series titled "The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld."

Errol Morris, welcome to Democracy Now! Why Donald Rumsfeld? Why did you choose him to be your subject of this film?

ERROLMORRIS: Things take on a logic of their own. I had made The Fog of War about Robert S. McNamara, a central figure, for me, as a young man, because of the war in Vietnam, one of the great disasters in American history. And I made the movie because of questions about that war. How did we get into such an incredible mess? Fifty-eight thousand American soldiers dead, millions of people in Southeast Asia dead. Call it the salt-and-pepper shakers or the bookends, but another disastrous war, another secretary of defense, and I decided that I wanted to do it again. Also, I had made a movie about Abu Ghraib, so there are a whole number of issues which are of great interest to me.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But the interesting thing is McNamara was sort of the reluctant warmonger, whereas Rumsfeld, in your film, is so certain about everything that he does. How did you first get him to agree to sit down, not just for an hour or two hours, for 33 hours of interviews, and to reveal so much about his own thoughts to you?

ERROLMORRIS: The simplest answer is because he wanted to. He wanted to explain himself. He wanted to provide an account of what he had done. Very early on, our first meeting—

AMYGOODMAN: Did he call you, or you call him?

ERROLMORRIS: I called him. I sent him a copy of The Fog of War in a letter. And I was told by his lawyer, Bob Barnett, that he would never, ever, ever speak to me. He said, "Forget about it. This is never going to happen." But he did call me. I went to Washington. We met. And this film is the result.

AMYGOODMAN: In that trailer we just played, he talked about the possibility of having become president. How would that have happened?

ERROLMORRIS: Could have happened in a whole number of different ways. He was extraordinarily successful at a very young age—four-term congressman from Illinois and then a whole number of Cabinet-level appointments in the Nixon administration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: He was the youngest secretary of defense in the history of the country, right?

ERROLMORRIS: Eventually, in the Ford administration, one of the youngest chiefs of staff, if not the youngest, before his assistant, Richard Cheney, took his place, and then the youngest secretary of defense. He has that distinction of being the youngest and the oldest secretary of defense, first time around for Ford and, of course, second time around for George W. Bush.

AMYGOODMAN: He wrote like 20,000 memos?

ERROLMORRIS: They were called "snowflakes," because there were so many of them, probably more—

AMYGOODMAN: And they were on white paper.

ERROLMORRIS: Probably more than 20,000.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to turn back to the film, Unknown Known.

ERROLMORRIS: How about "a lot"? We’ll call them—he wrote a lot.

AMYGOODMAN: Donald Rumsfeld talking about those memos that he wrote on Iraq.

DONALDRUMSFELD: If you look at the range of my memos, there might be one-tenth of 1 percent about Iraq. The reason I was concerned about Iraq is because four-star generals would come to me and say, "Mr. Secretary, we have a problem. Our orders are to fly over the northern part of Iraq and the southern part of Iraq on a daily basis with the Brits, and we are getting shot at. At some moment—could be tomorrow, could be next month, could be next year—one of our planes is going to be shot down, and our pilots and crews are going to be killed, or they’re going to be captured. The question will be: What in the world were we flying those flights for? What was the cost-benefit ratio? What was our country gaining?" So you sit down, and you say, "I think I’m going to see if I can get the president’s attention, remind him that our planes are being shot at, remind him that we don’t have a fresh policy for Iraq, and remind him that we’ve got a whole range of options"—not an obsession, a very measured, nuanced approach.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known. Our guest, the Oscar-winning documentarian Errol Morris. We’ll be back with him in a moment.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: Our guest this half of the show is Errol Morris, the director of the new documentary, The Unknown Known. He has won an Oscar for Best Documentary for his film The Fog of War. That was Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. This film is about Donald Rumsfeld. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, in this clip from The Unknown Known, our guest, Errol Morris, asks Rumsfeld about the torture memos that authorized techniques such as waterboarding against prisoners captured by the United States.

ERROLMORRIS: What about all these so-called torture memos?

DONALDRUMSFELD: Well, there were what? One or two or three. I don’t know the number, but there were not all of these so-called memos. They were mischaracterized as torture memos, and they came not out of the Bush administration, per se; they came out of the U.S. Department of Justice, blessed by the attorney general, the senior legal official of the United States of America, having been nominated by a president and confirmed by the United States Senate overwhelmingly. Little different cast I just put on it than the one you did. I’ll chalk that one up.

ERROLMORRIS: Was the reaction unfair?

DONALDRUMSFELD: Well, I’ve never read them.

ERROLMORRIS: Really?

DONALDRUMSFELD: No. I’m not a lawyer. What would I know?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Errol Morris, talk to us about that exchange you had with him.

ERROLMORRIS: Strange, looking at the clips, even here. They’re clips, of course, that I’m more than familiar with, having spent so much time with Donald Rumsfeld and having spent so much time edited this movie. Things surprised me in the interview and still surprise me. Someone asked me, "Is he completely insincere?" And I said, "No, the problem is he’s completely sincere." When he tells you he never read those torture memos, I don’t think he did. When he reads the laundry list of enhanced interrogation techniques, a.k.a. torture, he himself seems surprised by what he’s reading, as if he had never really carefully read them before. He suddenly says, "Good grief, that’s a pile of stuff." There’s this odd disconnection between these policies and what he thinks he’s doing.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about his—there are two things that struck me in the film. One is his periodic smile, that this—

ERROLMORRIS: The grin.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The grin of complete certainty about everything that he’s saying. And then the other thing is his relationship to language and his use of language. It’s certainly—he always seems to believe he has a better command of the answers than—clearly, than anyone asking him the questions.

ERROLMORRIS: I would put it differently. Orwell, George Orwell, wrote about how language could be used by people in power to control others. Often, I think this is a new twist on the story. He’s controlling others, hiding things from others, and also hiding things from himself. The end of the story, he retreats into a kind of strange Looney Tunes world of language, where he thinks if he can just find the right set of words, everything will be OK.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to—

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Oh, but I just want to ask him about that grin, the smile. Your sense of it?

ERROLMORRIS: My wife calls him the Cheshire Cat, Alice in Wonderland. Alice says about the cat, "I’ve often seen a cat without a grin; I’ve never seen a grin without a cat." It’s this strange, disembodied grin almost, this look of self-satisfaction, of pleasure, the cat that swallowed the canary. This is one of the strangest and most disturbing interviews I’ve ever done.

AMYGOODMAN: Of those tens of thousands of memos, what most shocked you? I mean, you’re bringing us, as you did with Fog of War, the war—then Vietnam, now Iraq—from the perspective of the person who’s running that war, or one of them.

ERROLMORRIS: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Of course, the question is: What about at the target end? Do you have a desire to make a film from a victim’s perspective?

ERROLMORRIS: I had a desire to make a very specific kind of film. I call it history from the inside out. This was also true of McNamara, Fog of War. How do they see the world? The memos, the oral history is a way in. I didn’t interview 15, 20 people. I interviewed one person.

AMYGOODMAN: Though you did interview many people; you just used one in the film, right, around this film, asking them their thoughts about Rumsfeld?

ERROLMORRIS: I interviewed only one person on camera. I actually interviewed two people on camera, but I knew I wasn’t using the second interview. It was an interview with his wife Joyce, who I very much liked.

But you asked me a question about whether there was one memo among these tens of thousands of memos that stood out among others. And I would say, yes, the most disturbing of the disturbing memos, of Rumsfeld’s greatest hits. Here’s a man of slogans and epithets and rules, etc., etc., etc. "Weakness is provocative." "Pearl Harbor is a failure of the imagination." But the most nefarious of them is: "Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence." And he said this to—guess who—the president of the United States. I see him reading this memo. Where does it come from? From the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was used by the British astronomer Martin Rees and by Carl Sagan. We’re looking for intelligent life somewhere else in the universe. Universe is a very big place. We haven’t found evidence, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not out there. Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I want to play an exchange from the Pentagon briefing in 2002, the infamous briefing when Rumsfeld first described his ideas about the known unknown to the public. He was questioned by NBC’s Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski.

JIMMIKLASZEWSKI: Could I follow up, Mr. Secretary, on what you just said, please? In regard to Iraq, weapons of mass destruction—weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, is there any evidence to indicate that Iraq has attempted to or is willing to supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction? Because there are reports that there is no evidence of a direct link between Baghdad and some of these terrorist organizations.

DEFENSESECRETARYDONALDRUMSFELD: The reports that say there’s—that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because, as we know, there are known knowns—there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones. And so, people who have the omniscience that they can say with high certainty that something has not happened, or is not being tried, have capabilities that are—what was the word you used, Pam, earlier?

PAMHESS: Free associate?

DEFENSESECRETARYDONALDRUMSFELD: Yeah, they can—they can do things I can’t do. Barbara?

JIMMIKLASZEWSKI: Excuse me, but is this an unknown unknown?

DEFENSESECRETARYDONALDRUMSFELD: I’m not—

JIMMIKLASZEWSKI: There’s several unknowns, and I’m just wondering if this is an unknown unknown.

DEFENSESECRETARYDONALDRUMSFELD: I’m not—I’m not going—I’m not going to say which it is.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Donald Rumsfeld back in 2002. But Donald Rumsfeld has been back in the news this week. During an appearance on Fox News, he said a trained ape could do a better job in Afghanistan than President Obama.

DONALDRUMSFELD: Yeah, our relationship with Karzai and with Afghanistan was absolutely first rate in the Bush administration. It has gone downhill like a toboggan ever since the Obama administration came in. Now, take for example the fact that we have status of forces agreement probably with 100, 125 countries in the world. This administration, the White House and the State Department, have failed to get a status of forces agreement. A trained ape could get a status of forces agreement. It does not take a genius.

ERROLMORRIS: Horrified. We all know that the various officials of the Bush administration, George W. Bush himself, will never be held accountable for most, if not all, of the things that happened under their watch. They can now sit back and crow about one thing or another and indulge in one form of partisan politics after another. Maybe that’s the most disturbing thing about this story. If they took us to war for no good reason, shouldn’t they be in some way held accountable for that fact? Isn’t that important to our democracy, that we just don’t simply sweep the past under the rug, that we deal with it in some fashion?

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, interestingly, in your interview with Rumsfeld, one of the—one of the mistakes he believes he made was not resigning after the Abu Ghraib revelations, even though he hastens to add that it was overblown as a systemic problem rather than a problem with a few guys, a few bad apples in the military on a night shift.

ERROLMORRIS: He tendered two resignations, neither of which were accepted by the president. He often wants to have it both ways. He will provide some gesture suggesting that he takes complete responsibility and on the other hand take none.

AMYGOODMAN: Does he ever apologize?

ERROLMORRIS: That word is not really part of his lexicon. No, there are no apologies.

AMYGOODMAN: What most shocked you in your 33 hours of conversation with Donald Rumsfeld?

ERROLMORRIS: So many things. The fact that he unendingly says things which are not true, about—he unendingly says things that are false. Does he even realize it?

AMYGOODMAN: So you say he lies throughout?

ERROLMORRIS: Lying—

AMYGOODMAN: We have two seconds.

ERROLMORRIS: —depends on a conscious element. Who the hell knows what’s going on upstairs. I most certainly don’t.

AMYGOODMAN: Errol Morris, I want to thank you for being with us, the director of the new documentary, The Unknown Known. It opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 2nd.

]]>
Thu, 27 Mar 2014 00:00:00 -0400As Italy Sentences 23 CIA Agents in Rendition Case, Obama Refuses to Prosecute Anyone for Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/21/as_italy_sentences_23_cia_agents
tag:democracynow.org,2012-09-21:en/story/52b7a1 AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re on the road in Madison, Wisconsin. We&#8217;ll be in Eau Claire at noon, and tonight we&#8217;ll be in Hayward, Wisonsin , tomorrow in Minneapolis . I&#8217;ll talk about the details later in the broadcast.
But right now, to the news out of Italy&#8217;s high court, which has upheld the sentences of 23 CIA operatives convicted of kidnapping a Muslim cleric under the U.S. program called &quot;extraordinary rendition.&quot; The cleric, Abu Omar, was seized from the streets of Milan in 2003 and taken to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being sent to Egypt, where he was tortured during a four-year imprisonment. The Americans were all convicted in absentia after the United States refused to hand them over. The ruling marks the final appeal in the first trial anywhere in the world involving the CIA&#8217;s practice of rendering terror suspects to countries that allow torture. The Italian government will now be obliged to make a formal request for the extradition of the Americans; however, it&#8217;s all but assured the Obama administration will continue its rejection.
Human Rights Watch praised the Italian court move. Andrea Prasow said, quote, &quot;Since the U.S. Justice Department appears entirely unwilling to investigate and prosecute these very serious crimes, other countries should move forward with their own cases against U.S. officials,&quot; unquote.
So far, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute individuals involved in the U.S. torture and rendition program. But as a candidate four years ago, Obama unequivocally denounced torture and extraordinary rendition.
SEN . BARACK OBAMA : We have to be clear and unequivocal: we do not torture, period. We don&#8217;t torture. Our government does not torture. That should be our position. That should be our position. That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions. We don&#8217;t farm out torture. We don&#8217;t subcontract torture.
AMY GOODMAN : That was then-presidential candidate Obama in 2008 speaking at CNN&#8217;s Compassion Forum.
Well, according to our next guest, four years after Obama made those comments, impunity for torture has now become a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government. We&#8217;re now joined by Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He&#8217;s the author of several books, including, most recently, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation . His past books include A Question of Torture and Policing America&#8217;s Empire .
Welcome back to Democracy Now!
ALFRED McCOY: Thank you, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : It&#8217;s great to be in your neighborhood here in Madison.
ALFRED McCOY: Thanks.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor McCoy, the title of your book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation , what is it?
ALFRED McCOY: The U.S. doctrine of coercive interrogation was developed during the Cold War. The CIA led the U.S. security establishment in a wide-ranging period of research that lasted about a decade, and they developed a new form of psychological torture—really the first revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, if not millennia. And it was essentially no-touch torture.
What they discovered through this research, a brilliant psychologist in Canada named Donald O. Hebb found that by putting student volunteers in cubicles with goggles, gloves and ear muffs through this process of sensory deprivation, they would suffer something akin to a psychotic breakdown. And that would also mean that deprived of sensory deprivation when interrogated, they would bond more readily with the interrogator.
The second discovery came through more CIA research into basically KGB Soviet techniques, which found that the—one of the most effective of KGB techniques was not beating the subject but simply making the subject stand immobile for days on an end, something we now call &quot;stress positions.&quot;
And these two techniques—sensory deprivation and stress positions—were articulated in a CIA manual, the &quot; KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation&quot; manual, in 1963 and disseminated throughout U.S. allies and U.S. security agencies. And that became a distinctive form of American psychological torture. That&#8217;s been the basic form we&#8217;ve used for the last 60 years.
AMY GOODMAN : Has it mattered whether there&#8217;s a Democratic or Republican president?
ALFRED McCOY: Yes, it has, actually, because that&#8217;s the sort of default position. This also created a contradiction between the U.S. public commitment to human rights at the U.N. and other international fora and this private doctrine of psychological torture, which seemed to contradict that commitment to human rights.
Under President George W. Bush, the United States resolved this contradiction. President Bush announced to his aides that—right after the 9/11 attacks, he said, &quot;I don&#8217;t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass.&quot; He then authorized the CIA to create a fleet of two dozen chartered jets for rendition. And, more importantly, during the Cold War, the CIA trained allies in the use of torture, but we never did it ourselves: we outsourced it. We funded prisons. We harvested the intelligence. President Bush resolved this contradiction by authorizing the CIA to open eight black sites from Thailand to Poland, and therefore, American CIA agents actually engaged in waterboarding, wall slamming and forms of psychological torture under President Bush. We did it ourselves.
What&#8217;s happened under President Obama is we&#8217;ve gone back to that Cold War policy of outsourcing the abuse to our allies, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, by, first of all, turning a blind eye to the abuse of our allies, as we did in Iraq until the time we were there, and we&#8217;re doing now in Afghanistan. And then, simultaneously, President Obama authorized the CIA very quietly to conduct extraordinary rendition.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain what extraordinary rendition is.
ALFRED McCOY: Under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, you&#8217;re not allowed to send somebody to a country where they will be subject to human rights abuse as defined by the Convention Against Torture. And rendition is the process of sending somebody to a country where they are likely to be tortured, in effect.
The contradiction between that segment you played and what Obama did is striking. In April of 2008, President Obama—unprompted—said, you know, &quot;I will ban torture, and that includes rendition.&quot; OK. But then, during his first days in office, when he signed that very dramatic order closing those same CIA black sites that we were just discussing, President Obama got—was under pressure from the CIA . The CIA counsel looked at that draft order and said, &quot;If you issue this as drafted, you&#8217;ll put us out of the rendition business.&quot; So, President Obama, being a skillful lawyer, added a footnote, and he defined a CIA prison in a way that exempted a prison for short-term transitory provisions. In other words, the CIA could have holding facilities to effect the rendition of subjects from one country to another on their fleet of executive aircraft. And that&#8217;s in the footnote of that dramatic, highly publicized order closing CIA black sites—except allowing rendition. It&#8217;s right there in the footnote. It was in black and white, but nobody noticed it, until the New York Times brought it out a few months ago.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor McCoy, I wanted to go to the first prime-time press conference that President Obama held after taking office. He was asked his opinion about a proposal put forward by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont to start a comprehensive truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the conduct of the Bush administration over that past eight years. This is how President Obama responded.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : My administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture, that we abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process as we are vigorously going after terrorists that can do us harm. And I don&#8217;t think those are contradictory. I think they are potentially complementary. My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I&#8217;m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.
AMY GOODMAN : That was President Obama, first prime-time news conference. Professor Alfred McCoy?
ALFRED McCOY: That&#8217;s the third stage of impunity. The first stage—and it&#8217;s a universal process. It happens in countries emerging from authoritarianism that have had problems with torture. Step one is blame the bad apples. Donald Rumsfeld did that right after the Abu Ghraib scandal was exposed in 2004.
Step two is saying that it was necessary for our national security—unfortunate, perhaps, but necessary to keep us all safe. That was done very articulately by former Vice President Cheney at the time, and he continues to make that argument. He claims that these &quot;enhanced techniques,&quot; as he calls them, i.e. CIA torture, saved thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of lives. OK?
The third step is the step we just witnessed in President Obama, saying that, well, whatever might have happened in the past, we need unity as a nation, we need to move forward together into the future. So, the past isn&#8217;t germane. We need to put it behind us, not investigate, not prosecute. And that was the position he was taking there.
The fourth stage is one that we&#8217;ve been going through for the past year. That&#8217;s been political attack by those implicated, under the Bush administration, in either conducting the torture or authorizing the torture. And that&#8217;s a political tack seeking not just exoneration, getting away with it, but seeking vindication, saying that not only, you know, was this legal, but it was necessary, it was imperative for our national security. And that&#8217;s an argument that the Bush administration made very forcefully when Osama bin Laden was killed in May of 2011. They argued that the enhanced interrogation under the Bush administration led the Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden. There&#8217;s no evidence for that, but they made that argument. And that put pressure on Attorney General Eric Holder to drop the—most of the investigations of CIA abuse. And then, very recently, the two investigations of detainees who were killed in CIA custody have been dropped, as well.
The fifth and final stage is one that&#8217;s ongoing right to the present, and that&#8217;s rewriting the history, rewriting the past, ripping it apart, without respect to the truth of the matter, and reconstructing it in a way that justifies the torture. And that happened on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 when Dick Cheney brought out his memoirs saying that the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah turned this hardened terrorist into—he called him &quot;a fountain of information&quot; that gave information that saved thousands of lives. OK? Well, you know, that was August 30th, 2011.
OK, on September 12th, 2011, former FBI interrogator, counterintelligence officer, Ali Soufan, came out with his memoirs. It turned out he was the American operative that conducted that interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. He was there in that safe house in Thailand, and there were two teams operating. And it turned out, in retrospect, when you look at what happened, it was the closest you can get to a scientific experiment into the relative effectiveness of empathetic FBI interrogation techniques and CIA coercive interrogation, CIA torture. And through four successive rounds, what happened is, Ali Soufan went in—he&#8217;s an Arabic speaker—he established empathy with Abu Zubaydah, and he got the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. George Tenet, CIA director, grew angry that the FBI , his rival agency, was getting all this information. He dispatched a team of tough CIA interrogators. They used these coercive techniques. The subject clamped up. No more information. The FBI was brought back in. More information from Abu Zubaydah based on non-coercive techniques.
And by the time this was done through four successive rounds, we established clearly, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt, that empathetic FBI techniques, with a skilled interrogator speaking to a subject in his language, OK, gets accurate intelligence. And all these CIA techniques—the sensory deprivation, the temperature modification, the noise blasting, the stress positions—all of that is counterproductive, does not work. OK? And that, that fragile truth, has been kept from us, because if you look at Ali Soufan&#8217;s memoirs, there&#8217;s 181 pages of CIA excisions that turned those passages about that interrogation of Abu Zubaydah into a rat&#8217;s nest of black lines that no regular American reader can possibly understand.
AMY GOODMAN : You write that under President Obama, still we are getting intelligence extracted by surrogates in places like Somalia, in Afghanistan.
ALFRED McCOY: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : And what does that mean—through torture?
ALFRED McCOY: What it means is that&#8217;s part of the outsourcing of this, OK? We now know through the WikiLeaks that after the Abu Ghraib scandal we reduced the number of detainees being held by U.S. forces in Iraq, and we transferred the detainees to Iraqi authorities, where the detainees were tortured. There were orders by the U.S. command, OK, that American soldiers, if they came across our Iraqi allies engaged in human rights abuse, they were not to do anything. And we know that from 2004 to 2009 U.S. forces collected, I think, 1,365 reports of Iraqi human rights abuse about which they did nothing.
In Afghanistan, it&#8217;s the same policy. Right after 2004, we started turning over the detainees that needed to be interrogated to the National Directorate of Security. In 2011, the United Nations investigated the Afghan National Security Directorate and found a systematic pattern of absolutely extraordinary human rights abuse, brutal physical tortures. And the United States continues to turn over detainees to the Afghan authorities. Britain and Canada will no longer turn them over, because of their concerns about human rights abuse.
So, in other—and we&#8217;re doing the same thing in Somalia. Jeremy Scahill, investigative reporter, did a superb report and found that in Mogadishu, the Somali authorities operate, in their security directorate, a prison called &quot;the Hole&quot; in the basement of their building. And the CIA engages in—
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to have to leave it there, but we&#8217;re going to continue the conversation and post it online at democracynow.org. Thank you so much, Professor Alfred McCoy. His book is called Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation . Go online to see the rest at democracynow.org and to see our Election 2012 Silenced Majority Tour . Today we&#8217;ll be in Eau Claire at noon; tonight in Hayward, Wisconsin ; tomorrow, Minneapolis . AMYGOODMAN: We’re on the road in Madison, Wisconsin. We’ll be in Eau Claire at noon, and tonight we’ll be in Hayward, Wisonsin, tomorrow in Minneapolis. I’ll talk about the details later in the broadcast.

But right now, to the news out of Italy’s high court, which has upheld the sentences of 23 CIA operatives convicted of kidnapping a Muslim cleric under the U.S. program called "extraordinary rendition." The cleric, Abu Omar, was seized from the streets of Milan in 2003 and taken to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being sent to Egypt, where he was tortured during a four-year imprisonment. The Americans were all convicted in absentia after the United States refused to hand them over. The ruling marks the final appeal in the first trial anywhere in the world involving the CIA’s practice of rendering terror suspects to countries that allow torture. The Italian government will now be obliged to make a formal request for the extradition of the Americans; however, it’s all but assured the Obama administration will continue its rejection.

Human Rights Watch praised the Italian court move. Andrea Prasow said, quote, "Since the U.S. Justice Department appears entirely unwilling to investigate and prosecute these very serious crimes, other countries should move forward with their own cases against U.S. officials," unquote.

So far, the Obama administration has refused to prosecute individuals involved in the U.S. torture and rendition program. But as a candidate four years ago, Obama unequivocally denounced torture and extraordinary rendition.

SEN. BARACKOBAMA: We have to be clear and unequivocal: we do not torture, period. We don’t torture. Our government does not torture. That should be our position. That should be our position. That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions. We don’t farm out torture. We don’t subcontract torture.

AMYGOODMAN: That was then-presidential candidate Obama in 2008 speaking at CNN’s Compassion Forum.

Well, according to our next guest, four years after Obama made those comments, impunity for torture has now become a bipartisan policy of the U.S. government. We’re now joined by Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s the author of several books, including, most recently, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. His past books include A Question of Torture and Policing America’s Empire.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!

ALFRED McCOY: Thank you, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s great to be in your neighborhood here in Madison.

ALFRED McCOY: Thanks.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor McCoy, the title of your book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation, what is it?

ALFRED McCOY: The U.S. doctrine of coercive interrogation was developed during the Cold War. The CIA led the U.S. security establishment in a wide-ranging period of research that lasted about a decade, and they developed a new form of psychological torture—really the first revolution in the cruel science of pain in centuries, if not millennia. And it was essentially no-touch torture.

What they discovered through this research, a brilliant psychologist in Canada named Donald O. Hebb found that by putting student volunteers in cubicles with goggles, gloves and ear muffs through this process of sensory deprivation, they would suffer something akin to a psychotic breakdown. And that would also mean that deprived of sensory deprivation when interrogated, they would bond more readily with the interrogator.

The second discovery came through more CIA research into basically KGB Soviet techniques, which found that the—one of the most effective of KGB techniques was not beating the subject but simply making the subject stand immobile for days on an end, something we now call "stress positions."

And these two techniques—sensory deprivation and stress positions—were articulated in a CIA manual, the "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual, in 1963 and disseminated throughout U.S. allies and U.S. security agencies. And that became a distinctive form of American psychological torture. That’s been the basic form we’ve used for the last 60 years.

AMYGOODMAN: Has it mattered whether there’s a Democratic or Republican president?

ALFRED McCOY: Yes, it has, actually, because that’s the sort of default position. This also created a contradiction between the U.S. public commitment to human rights at the U.N. and other international fora and this private doctrine of psychological torture, which seemed to contradict that commitment to human rights.

Under President George W. Bush, the United States resolved this contradiction. President Bush announced to his aides that—right after the 9/11 attacks, he said, "I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." He then authorized the CIA to create a fleet of two dozen chartered jets for rendition. And, more importantly, during the Cold War, the CIA trained allies in the use of torture, but we never did it ourselves: we outsourced it. We funded prisons. We harvested the intelligence. President Bush resolved this contradiction by authorizing the CIA to open eight black sites from Thailand to Poland, and therefore, American CIA agents actually engaged in waterboarding, wall slamming and forms of psychological torture under President Bush. We did it ourselves.

What’s happened under President Obama is we’ve gone back to that Cold War policy of outsourcing the abuse to our allies, in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, by, first of all, turning a blind eye to the abuse of our allies, as we did in Iraq until the time we were there, and we’re doing now in Afghanistan. And then, simultaneously, President Obama authorized the CIA very quietly to conduct extraordinary rendition.

AMYGOODMAN: And explain what extraordinary rendition is.

ALFRED McCOY: Under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, you’re not allowed to send somebody to a country where they will be subject to human rights abuse as defined by the Convention Against Torture. And rendition is the process of sending somebody to a country where they are likely to be tortured, in effect.

The contradiction between that segment you played and what Obama did is striking. In April of 2008, President Obama—unprompted—said, you know, "I will ban torture, and that includes rendition." OK. But then, during his first days in office, when he signed that very dramatic order closing those same CIA black sites that we were just discussing, President Obama got—was under pressure from the CIA. The CIA counsel looked at that draft order and said, "If you issue this as drafted, you’ll put us out of the rendition business." So, President Obama, being a skillful lawyer, added a footnote, and he defined a CIA prison in a way that exempted a prison for short-term transitory provisions. In other words, the CIA could have holding facilities to effect the rendition of subjects from one country to another on their fleet of executive aircraft. And that’s in the footnote of that dramatic, highly publicized order closing CIA black sites—except allowing rendition. It’s right there in the footnote. It was in black and white, but nobody noticed it, until the New York Times brought it out a few months ago.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor McCoy, I wanted to go to the first prime-time press conference that President Obama held after taking office. He was asked his opinion about a proposal put forward by Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont to start a comprehensive truth and reconciliation commission to investigate the conduct of the Bush administration over that past eight years. This is how President Obama responded.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: My administration is going to operate in a way that leaves no doubt that we do not torture, that we abide by the Geneva Conventions, and that we observe our traditions of rule of law and due process as we are vigorously going after terrorists that can do us harm. And I don’t think those are contradictory. I think they are potentially complementary. My view is also that nobody is above the law, and if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen, but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.

AMYGOODMAN: That was President Obama, first prime-time news conference. Professor Alfred McCoy?

ALFRED McCOY: That’s the third stage of impunity. The first stage—and it’s a universal process. It happens in countries emerging from authoritarianism that have had problems with torture. Step one is blame the bad apples. Donald Rumsfeld did that right after the Abu Ghraib scandal was exposed in 2004.

Step two is saying that it was necessary for our national security—unfortunate, perhaps, but necessary to keep us all safe. That was done very articulately by former Vice President Cheney at the time, and he continues to make that argument. He claims that these "enhanced techniques," as he calls them, i.e. CIA torture, saved thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of lives. OK?

The third step is the step we just witnessed in President Obama, saying that, well, whatever might have happened in the past, we need unity as a nation, we need to move forward together into the future. So, the past isn’t germane. We need to put it behind us, not investigate, not prosecute. And that was the position he was taking there.

The fourth stage is one that we’ve been going through for the past year. That’s been political attack by those implicated, under the Bush administration, in either conducting the torture or authorizing the torture. And that’s a political tack seeking not just exoneration, getting away with it, but seeking vindication, saying that not only, you know, was this legal, but it was necessary, it was imperative for our national security. And that’s an argument that the Bush administration made very forcefully when Osama bin Laden was killed in May of 2011. They argued that the enhanced interrogation under the Bush administration led the Navy SEALs to Osama bin Laden. There’s no evidence for that, but they made that argument. And that put pressure on Attorney General Eric Holder to drop the—most of the investigations of CIA abuse. And then, very recently, the two investigations of detainees who were killed in CIA custody have been dropped, as well.

The fifth and final stage is one that’s ongoing right to the present, and that’s rewriting the history, rewriting the past, ripping it apart, without respect to the truth of the matter, and reconstructing it in a way that justifies the torture. And that happened on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 when Dick Cheney brought out his memoirs saying that the use of enhanced techniques on Abu Zubaydah turned this hardened terrorist into—he called him "a fountain of information" that gave information that saved thousands of lives. OK? Well, you know, that was August 30th, 2011.

OK, on September 12th, 2011, former FBI interrogator, counterintelligence officer, Ali Soufan, came out with his memoirs. It turned out he was the American operative that conducted that interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. He was there in that safe house in Thailand, and there were two teams operating. And it turned out, in retrospect, when you look at what happened, it was the closest you can get to a scientific experiment into the relative effectiveness of empathetic FBI interrogation techniques and CIA coercive interrogation, CIA torture. And through four successive rounds, what happened is, Ali Soufan went in—he’s an Arabic speaker—he established empathy with Abu Zubaydah, and he got the name of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. George Tenet, CIA director, grew angry that the FBI, his rival agency, was getting all this information. He dispatched a team of tough CIA interrogators. They used these coercive techniques. The subject clamped up. No more information. The FBI was brought back in. More information from Abu Zubaydah based on non-coercive techniques.

And by the time this was done through four successive rounds, we established clearly, beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt, that empathetic FBI techniques, with a skilled interrogator speaking to a subject in his language, OK, gets accurate intelligence. And all these CIA techniques—the sensory deprivation, the temperature modification, the noise blasting, the stress positions—all of that is counterproductive, does not work. OK? And that, that fragile truth, has been kept from us, because if you look at Ali Soufan’s memoirs, there’s 181 pages of CIA excisions that turned those passages about that interrogation of Abu Zubaydah into a rat’s nest of black lines that no regular American reader can possibly understand.

AMYGOODMAN: You write that under President Obama, still we are getting intelligence extracted by surrogates in places like Somalia, in Afghanistan.

ALFRED McCOY: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: And what does that mean—through torture?

ALFRED McCOY: What it means is that’s part of the outsourcing of this, OK? We now know through the WikiLeaks that after the Abu Ghraib scandal we reduced the number of detainees being held by U.S. forces in Iraq, and we transferred the detainees to Iraqi authorities, where the detainees were tortured. There were orders by the U.S. command, OK, that American soldiers, if they came across our Iraqi allies engaged in human rights abuse, they were not to do anything. And we know that from 2004 to 2009 U.S. forces collected, I think, 1,365 reports of Iraqi human rights abuse about which they did nothing.

In Afghanistan, it’s the same policy. Right after 2004, we started turning over the detainees that needed to be interrogated to the National Directorate of Security. In 2011, the United Nations investigated the Afghan National Security Directorate and found a systematic pattern of absolutely extraordinary human rights abuse, brutal physical tortures. And the United States continues to turn over detainees to the Afghan authorities. Britain and Canada will no longer turn them over, because of their concerns about human rights abuse.

So, in other—and we’re doing the same thing in Somalia. Jeremy Scahill, investigative reporter, did a superb report and found that in Mogadishu, the Somali authorities operate, in their security directorate, a prison called "the Hole" in the basement of their building. And the CIA engages in—

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue the conversation and post it online at democracynow.org. Thank you so much, Professor Alfred McCoy. His book is called Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation . Go online to see the rest at democracynow.org and to see our Election 2012 Silenced Majority Tour. Today we’ll be in Eau Claire at noon; tonight in Hayward, Wisconsin; tomorrow, Minneapolis.

]]>
Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0400A Debate on Human Rights Watch's Call for Bush Administration Officials to be Tried for Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/7/12/a_debate_on_human_rights_watchs
tag:democracynow.org,2011-07-12:en/story/3e1e41 AMY GOODMAN : Human Rights Watch has released a major new report calling on the U.S. government to launch a broad criminal investigation into alleged crimes of torture committed by former President George W. Bush and other top officials under his administration. It comes on the heels of a Justice Department investigation into alleged torture, abuse and murder during the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced it would launch a full criminal investigation into the deaths of just two prisoners out of 101 cases under review, including one who died at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Human Rights Watch&#8217;s 107-page report urges a probe of all officials responsible for implementing practices such as waterboarding, the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured. The Obama administration has declared waterboarding a form of torture and banned its use since taking office, but has not prosecuted any Bush administration officials to date. Shortly after he took office, Obama was asked if he supported prosecutions for Bush-era torture.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : Nobody is above the law. And if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen—but that, generally speaking, I&#8217;m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.
AMY GOODMAN : That was President Obama speaking in 2009. The new Human Rights Watch report says the Obama administration has failed to meet U.S. obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill treatment of prisoners. It also notes former President George W. Bush has admitted he personally approved the waterboarding of the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In an interview on The Daily Show in 2010, former Justice Department attorney John Yoo told Jon Stewart he does not believe the Bush administration made any mistakes.
JON STEWART : Did Bush make a mistake in pursuing, perhaps, inhumane treatment of combatants, that if our soldiers were treated similarly, we would be outraged?
JOHN YOO : Look, I don&#8217;t think that they made a mistake in deciding to go beyond the law enforcement paradigm, because it was an unconventional, unprecedented type of war. You&#8217;re quite right to say, oh, well, there&#8217;s a war sometimes—
JON STEWART : How is terrorism—but how is terrorism unprecedented?
JOHN YOO : Because we were attacked for the first time by a non-state group.
JON STEWART : In the 1930s, we had anarchists bomb government buildings.
JOHN YOO : They didn&#8217;t blow up and kill 3,000 people in New York City, either. They didn&#8217;t destroy the World Trade Center and try to decapitate the government, either.
AMY GOODMAN : That was former Justice Department attorney John Yoo.
In addition to calling for an investigation at home, Human Rights Watch says other countries should prosecute U.S. officials if the U.S. government does not pursue credible criminal probes. The report also details how WikiLeaks diplomatic cables reveal that U.S. officials have previously sought to curtail such investigations, as in the case of Spanish prosecutors pursuing a case against former top U.S. officials who authorized the use of torture.
For more, we&#8217;re joined here in New York by Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. And we&#8217;re joined in Louisiana by John Baker, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law School. He&#8217;s joining us from Baton Rouge from the PBS station WLPB .
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Lay out the findings further, Ken, in your report.
KENNETH ROTH : Well, we, first of all, begin by adding up all of the evidence that particularly the senior Bush officials ordered torture. And we look, for example, to the admissions that you mentioned of President Bush. There&#8217;s a similar admission in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld&#8217;s memoir. And there&#8217;s considerable evidence that people like George Tenet or Dick Cheney presided over the so-called principals meetings, where the interrogation policy was decided. So we&#8217;re not focusing primarily on the lower-level interrogators, but rather on the senior officials who ordered torture.
And what led us to issue the report now is that despite this considerable evidence, the Obama administration has done virtually nothing to pursue these serious crimes. The investigation that you just mentioned, the John Durham investigation, looked only at unauthorized torture—that is, people who exceeded their orders. But the problem was not the occasional interrogator who, in an excess of enthusiasm, went beyond the orders. The problem was the orders themselves. They allowed things like waterboarding, which was—is basically mock execution by drowning, a paradigmatic form of torture. And to exempt those kinds of extreme interrogation practices, just because some senior Bush official ordered them, is wrong. It&#8217;s a dereliction of President Obama&#8217;s responsibility to enforce the criminal law that he basically has, as you saw in the clip, said he will look forward, not back. He will stop torture by U.S. interrogators from now on, or really from the beginning of his administration, but he will not look at the torture of the Bush officials. And that really, in a sense—it abandons his duty as what you might call the prosecutor-in-chief to not simply abide by the criminal law, but to enforce it, as well.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor John Baker, your response?
JOHN BAKER : Well, first of all, there&#8217;s no definition of &quot;torture.&quot; I mean, the throwing around of the word &quot;torture&quot; has been the problem in this whole thing. And there has not been the case made this morning that distinguishes what really is torture from broad accusations that they ordered torture. When you read those memos, much criticized by the antiwar left, you see that there was a serious attempt—you can disagree with it, but a serious attempt—to look at what the law was and to give legal guidance on that. That&#8217;s unprecedented. Other countries don&#8217;t do this. We take seriously our obligations.
And the idea that we would go and prosecute senior officials, the President and others, is simply beyond anything we&#8217;ve ever done in this country, and there&#8217;s no basis for it. I mean, if we&#8217;re going to have a situation where every time we have a change of party in the White House, that the new administration prosecutes the former administration, then we really are going down the path of some third-world countries. I mean, one can make a case against President Obama, for instance, that the use of drones to kill enemy—enemies in other countries is unnecessary, that instead we could capture them, and that he has gone well beyond self-defense. One can make that case. I&#8217;m not going to make it, but one can make it. I don&#8217;t want a future administration under Republicans coming in and talking about prosecuting Attorney General Holder or President Obama. I don&#8217;t think that that is healthy.
AMY GOODMAN : Ken Roth? Let&#8217;s get Ken Roth to respond.
JOHN BAKER : And I don&#8217;t think it is justified.
AMY GOODMAN : Ken Roth?
KENNETH ROTH : All right. Well, first, with all due respect to Professor Baker, there is a definition of torture. It&#8217;s contained in the torture convention, which, Amy, you mentioned at the outset, an international treaty that the United States and 140-some other governments have ratified. And it says that torture is the intentional infliction of severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental. The kinds of techniques that we&#8217;re talking about clearly fall under that definition. A mock execution is a paradigmatic form of psychological torture. Everybody understands that. The U.S. has prosecuted others for engaging in that. That&#8217;s what waterboarding is. It&#8217;s mock execution by drowning. Similarly, imposing these painful stress positions on people for long periods, subjecting them to prolonged sleep deprivation, to extremes of hot and cold, to beating and the like, these are all classic forms of torture. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s really in dispute.
So, the real issue is, did the officials who ordered that kind of torture—should they be exempted just because they were members of the prior administration? Now, Professor Baker seems to say that it somehow—it politicizes the criminal law for one president to hold another to that law, to prosecute clear transgressions of the law. I don&#8217;t buy that. I think, and I think most Americans feel, that this nation is a nation of laws and that their politicians and government officials should not be exempt from that view. Now, obviously, there were some who took different points of view. President Nixon notoriously saw himself as the president and therefore above the law. But he was hounded from office. I don&#8217;t think anyone thinks that when an official like Bush or Cheney, Rumsfeld or Tenet commits serious violations of law by ordering the criminal act of torture, that simply because they were a senior official, they should be exempted.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go to one of the key pieces of evidence against former President George W. Bush, has been his own words. This was an interview he did last November with NBC&#8217;s Matt Lauer, in which President Bush openly admitted authorizing the use of torture on prisoners.
MATT LAUER : Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?
GEORGE W. BUSH : Because the lawyers said it was legal, said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I’m not a lawyer. And—but you got to trust the judgment of people around you. And I do.
MATT LAUER : You say it’s legal, and the lawyers told me.
GEORGE W. BUSH : Yeah.
MATT LAUER : Critics say that you got the Justice Department to give you the legal guidance and the legal memos that you wanted.
GEORGE W. BUSH : Well—
MATT LAUER : Tom Kean, who was the former Republican co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, said they got legal opinions they wanted from their own people.
GEORGE W. BUSH : Well, he obviously doesn’t know. I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That’s why I’ve written the book. He can—they can draw whatever conclusion they want.
MATT LAUER : If it’s legal, President Bush, then if an American is taken into custody in a foreign country, not necessarily a uniformed American—
GEORGE W. BUSH : Look, I’m not going to debate the issue, Matt. I really—
MATT LAUER : I’m just asking. Would it be OK for a foreign country to waterboard an American citizen?
GEORGE W. BUSH : It’s—all I ask is that people read the book. And they can reach the same conclusion if they would have made the same decision I made or not.
MATT LAUER : You’d make the same decision again today?
GEORGE W. BUSH : Yeah, I would.
AMY GOODMAN : That was George W. Bush speaking to Matt Lauer. Ken Roth?
KENNETH ROTH : Well, I mean, first of all, Matt was absolutely correct to point to these legal opinions, because the Bush administration basically shopped around for the right legal opinion. They went down the hierarchy in the Justice Department. They found a very acquiescent individual, John Yoo, who wrote a memo, which if you read that memo, this is not an honest assessment of the law. This is a very partisan analysis designed to legalize something that&#8217;s illegal.
Now, for the President then to say, &quot;Oh, well, my lawyer said it was legal, therefore I can do it,&quot; that&#8217;s completely disingenuous. It&#8217;s one thing for a sort of a low-level interrogator, who may not know the origins of a legal memo, to rely on it. But for the President, for Cheney, who put pressure on the various lawyers to approve the torture, who chose the authors of these memos, to then rely on this legal opinion, that&#8217;s basically just, you know, turning lawyers into members of the criminal conspiracy. That should not be grounds for any kind of defense to charges of torture.
AMY GOODMAN : By the way, we did invite Professor Yoo, now a law professor at University of California, Berkeley, to be on the broadcast, but he declined our request. Professor John Baker, your response to what Kenneth Roth has just said?
JOHN BAKER : Well, first of all, Amy, did you notice how you biased the statement? You said that President Bush admitted that he ordered torture. He never made such a statement at all. What you&#8217;ve done is to leap from what he said, and you labeled it torture. The reality is, if you read those memos—and the thing that is being lost here is that if you are going to turn war into a criminal process, then you at least ought to pay attention to criminal law. Now, there&#8217;s been no mention here that the essence of crime is specific intent. And the reason I&#8217;m focusing on the definition of torture is because that is in the statutory definition. There has to be specific intent to inflict this serious harm. And the memos go through it in great detail as to whether or not such and such is a serious harm and whether there is specific intent. Secondly, completely lost in this is the defense of self-defense and defense of others. That affects the definition of torture.
AMY GOODMAN : Ken Roth.
KENNETH ROTH : Yeah, well, on this argument of self-defense, again, with all due respect to Professor Baker, I would urge him to read the definition of the crime, because the crime focuses—
JOHN BAKER : I have. I have, believe me.
KENNETH ROTH : —on the intentional infliction—let me finish, please. The crime focuses on the intentional infliction—
JOHN BAKER : No, it&#8217;s specific intent. It&#8217;s not just intentional.
KENNETH ROTH : —of severe pain or suffering. It doesn&#8217;t say it&#8217;s OK to impose severe pain if you have a good reason. It says, for whatever reason, if you impose that pain, it is a crime. So, you know, by Professor Baker&#8217;s view, if the interrogators were defending America, they could, you know, severely beat someone, they could rape the person, they can mutilate them. They could do whatever they wanted, because it was for a good cause: it was for self-defense. That&#8217;s not the law. The law prohibits the intentional infliction of pain or suffering in severe forms, regardless of the reason.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go back to John Yoo, the former Justice Department—
JOHN BAKER : Look, you don&#8217;t—
AMY GOODMAN : —attorney. John Baker—
JOHN BAKER : Could I come back in here, please?
AMY GOODMAN : Yeah, go ahead, for a quick second.
JOHN BAKER : Could I come back in here? Look, he simply doesn&#8217;t understand criminal law, because when you define a crime, it is not complete in its definition until you consider the defenses. So his narrowing of the definition is simply wrong. You know, I don&#8217;t know whether you teach criminal law, but you have to consider the defenses. And the definition of killing of another human being, of murder, depending on how you draft it, you don&#8217;t exclude the defenses. So, if you have a criminal code, which we don&#8217;t have at the federal level, what you do is you consider the offense, and you also consider the defenses. And what you&#8217;re doing is eliminating the defense. You&#8217;re saying that we can&#8217;t act in a legitimate way, even using force, to defend ourselves. And that is a completely absurd position.
KENNETH ROTH : Yeah, let me just address that, because, first of all, Professor Baker, please don&#8217;t lecture me on criminal law. I was a federal prosecutor for five years in New York and Washington. I know exactly what I&#8217;m talking about. If the law were, as you say it is—
JOHN BAKER : Well, then you know what I&#8217;m talking about, that you can&#8217;t ignore the defenses.
KENNETH ROTH : Let me finish. If the law were as you said it was, as long as the war were fought for defensive purposes, you would throw the Geneva Conventions out the door. You could do anything. You could mutilate prisoners. You could rape them. You could do whatever you want, as long as it was in self-defense. Believe me, that is not the law.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go to former Justice Department attorney John Yoo—
JOHN BAKER : That is not what—that—
AMY GOODMAN : —who defended his role in drafting the Bush administration torture memos. As I said, we did invite him on the show. He declined, but he did have a debate with you, Ken Roth, on the Charlie Rose show, where he defended the use of aggressive interrogation techniques.
JOHN YOO : The laws of war are enforced. You know, the laws of war, where we treat each other&#8217;s soldiers, give them prisoner of war status and so on, are enforced by reciprocal treatment. And that&#8217;s the idea that if we treat them—
CHARLIE ROSE : But that&#8217;s when you have two nation states.
JOHN YOO : I know. Yeah, exactly. And so, that&#8217;s the problem, is that we are fighting an enemy that is not a nation state, either in Iraq with the insurgency or al-Qaeda throughout the world. They do not provide people with POW treatment. They don&#8217;t have POW bases. As far as we can tell, they don&#8217;t take prisoners, or they behead prisoners. And so, the question is, what is the benefit that we&#8217;re getting, in this particular war, by providing POW treatment or providing them with the kind of treatment we usually reserve for nation state regular armed forces, when if you use this other standard that we can give them under the law, we have the possibility of getting more information through aggressive interrogation techniques that could stop a future attack on the United States?
CHARLIE ROSE : What&#8217;s the answer?
AMY GOODMAN : In the same interview, Yoo claimed Israel had decreased suicide attacks by using enhanced interrogation techniques.
JOHN YOO : The Israeli commission found that the use of these kind of aggressive interrogation techniques went broader than it was authorized for. They also found that a number—a high percentage of suicide bombers are stopped by information gathered from these kind of interrogations.
AMY GOODMAN : Kenneth Roth, your response to John Yoo&#8217;s assertions that America&#8217;s enemies are not nation states, so they&#8217;re not entitled to certain protections, and the assertion that torture ultimately works?
KENNETH ROTH : Well, John Yoo was confusing two different issues. He refers to prisoner of war status, which indeed is reserved for conflicts between governments that respect the Geneva Conventions. But the prohibition on torture transcends that. That applies to any prisoner, whether a POW or a terrorist. If you&#8217;re in war or, for that matter, if it&#8217;s a regular criminal matter, no one can be tortured. There is—it is an absolute prohibition that has nothing to do with reciprocity.
Now, as to the argument that torture works, I mean, we heard this most recently with bin Laden&#8217;s killing. You know, Cheney got on the air and said, &quot;Aha! It was because of the enhanced interrogation techniques.&quot; But if you look closely even at what Cheney says, he never claims that it was the torture or the enhanced interrogation technique that produced the information. He would say, you know, prisoners who had been subject to this helped in the capture of bin Laden. And indeed, when you start looking more closely at the evidence, it turns out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who of course was tortured 183 times under waterboarding, he lied about the key courier who ended up leading to bin Laden. So, even somebody who was subjected to these extreme forms of torture didn&#8217;t fess up the truth about what was going on. And if you talk to the professional interrogators, they will say that it&#8217;s far more effective to build a rapport with a person under interrogation and that that kind of voluntary cooperation is a much more valuable form to—of cracking these secretive criminal conspiracies than twisting somebody&#8217;s arm or subjecting them to waterboarding.
AMY GOODMAN : Professor John Baker?
JOHN BAKER : Well, on the first point, I agree with Mr. Roth that there is certainly a difference between the treatment accorded under a treaty as opposed to the torture provisions in our statute and well as the convention. And yes, there is a prohibition against torture of anybody. But again, we come back to what is torture. And Mr. Roth simply took the argument and expanded it. I&#8217;ve never argued that it is a general defense for everything. As Mr. Roth should know, if he was a former prosecutor, then when we look at self-defense or defense of others, it always depends on the particular circumstances. And if you read those memos, the circumstances were laid out. And carefully in the memos, they say, assuming that these are the facts and that these are only the facts and there aren&#8217;t any other facts, as the facts change, then it&#8217;s different. So, contrary to what Mr. Roth says and what many law professors believe, many who haven&#8217;t read this stuff or who don&#8217;t teach criminal law, there is a plausible argument in these memos. You may disagree with the argument. Lawyers disagree on all kinds of things. But to simply blanket and say that this was clearly torture, to me, is nonsense. It&#8217;s simply not good legal argument.
AMY GOODMAN : Ken Roth, I wanted to follow up on another point in your report, encouraging other countries to prosecute U.S. officials if the U.S. is not going to prosecute their own.
KENNETH ROTH : Yeah, well, this is a serious problem. The United States regularly pushes other governments to prosecute their torturers, their war criminals. But when the U.S., as, you know, perhaps the most visible nation in the world, doesn&#8217;t abide by that same standard, it not only undermines U.S. credibility as a proponent of enforcing international human rights law, but it also sets a very visible negative example. I had this experience. I met a couple of years ago with the Egyptian prime minister at a point where we had just received evidence that a bunch of suspects, terrorism suspects, had been picked up and were being tortured. And I met with him in his office, and I pressed him to stop it. And without skipping a beat, he looked at me and said, &quot;Well, that&#8217;s what Bush does.&quot; And now, that&#8217;s a cheap answer. We all know that. But it&#8217;s a politically effective answer. If a government as powerful as the United States is flouting its obligations to prosecute torturers, why do we expect anybody else to do that?
AMY GOODMAN : Should it be taken to the ICC , the International Criminal Court?
KENNETH ROTH : Well, you know, unfortunately, the International Criminal Court doesn&#8217;t have jurisdiction over most of these cases. The only way it could get jurisdiction would be for the U.N. Security Council to hand it jurisdiction, and that&#8217;s not going to happen with the U.S. sitting there and exercising its veto. So, as a practical matter, I mean, we have a strong preference for domestic prosecutions. I think for Obama to live up to his obligation as prosecutor-in-chief and to authorize Attorney General Eric Holder to pursue these investigations, that would be the preferred model. But if that doesn&#8217;t work, the only real alternative is for other governments to prosecute under their power of universal jurisdiction. This is what Spain tried to do, and the Obama administration stepped in and stopped them.
AMY GOODMAN : And we know that from the WikiLeaks documents—
KENNETH ROTH : Precisely.
AMY GOODMAN : —that trove of documents that are slowly being released. Julian Assange, as we speak, is in court. The significance of WikiLeaks for Human Rights Watch and gathering information, can you talk about that?
KENNETH ROTH : Well, I have to say, the massive WikiLeaks leak largely confirmed what we already knew. I mean, it was, you know, I suppose, surprising to see that these State Department memos were reasonably well written. They were insightful. Their analysis wasn&#8217;t that far off from the analysis that Human Rights Watch researchers on the ground were providing. So, I didn&#8217;t see any great insights provided by the vast bulk of those documents, other than a kind of reconfirmation that the U.S. embassies are sort of seeing things as we see them. And the real issue is, what do they do about it? Sometimes they are pushing to protect human rights, but too often they&#8217;re not.
AMY GOODMAN : Final word, Professor Baker?
JOHN BAKER : Well, a couple of things. First of all, as to foreign leaders accusing us of ignoring torturers because people like Mr. Roth are accusing people in the United States of torture, when in fact the issue is whether there was or wasn&#8217;t torture. Secondly, this idea of universal jurisdiction in international law is highly controversial. Indeed, if there is universal jurisdiction, then there&#8217;s nothing left to sovereignty. If every country can extend its police powers beyond its borders, that&#8217;s a prescription not only for chaos; it&#8217;s actually a prescription for war.
AMY GOODMAN : Final question from what Professor Baker said, and this is to Ken Roth, when he said, well, then you should be looking at President Obama, their drone attacks killing civilians in Pakistan. What about that?
KENNETH ROTH : Yeah, well, the drone attacks, the Obama administration says, are attacks on combatants. In war, you can shoot at the other side&#8217;s combatants. It&#8217;s very different from torturing somebody in custody. Now, Professor Baker says, oh, maybe there&#8217;s a self-defense argument. Let me say that there really isn&#8217;t, under any reasonable definition. But, you know, let&#8217;s bring that to a jury. The evidence is overwhelming that senior Bush officials authorized torture, more than enough for Eric Holder to prosecute, if Obama would just let him do that. He should.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;ll leave it there. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and Professor John Baker, of Louisiana State University Law School, professor emeritus there. AMYGOODMAN: Human Rights Watch has released a major new report calling on the U.S. government to launch a broad criminal investigation into alleged crimes of torture committed by former President George W. Bush and other top officials under his administration. It comes on the heels of a Justice Department investigation into alleged torture, abuse and murder during the interrogation of detainees in CIA custody. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice announced it would launch a full criminal investigation into the deaths of just two prisoners out of 101 cases under review, including one who died at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Human Rights Watch’s 107-page report urges a probe of all officials responsible for implementing practices such as waterboarding, the use of secret CIA prisons, and the transfer of detainees to countries where they were tortured. The Obama administration has declared waterboarding a form of torture and banned its use since taking office, but has not prosecuted any Bush administration officials to date. Shortly after he took office, Obama was asked if he supported prosecutions for Bush-era torture.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: Nobody is above the law. And if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen—but that, generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.

AMYGOODMAN: That was President Obama speaking in 2009. The new Human Rights Watch report says the Obama administration has failed to meet U.S. obligations under the Convention against Torture to investigate acts of torture and other ill treatment of prisoners. It also notes former President George W. Bush has admitted he personally approved the waterboarding of the self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In an interview on The Daily Show in 2010, former Justice Department attorney John Yoo told Jon Stewart he does not believe the Bush administration made any mistakes.

JONSTEWART: Did Bush make a mistake in pursuing, perhaps, inhumane treatment of combatants, that if our soldiers were treated similarly, we would be outraged?

JOHNYOO: Look, I don’t think that they made a mistake in deciding to go beyond the law enforcement paradigm, because it was an unconventional, unprecedented type of war. You’re quite right to say, oh, well, there’s a war sometimes—

JONSTEWART: How is terrorism—but how is terrorism unprecedented?

JOHNYOO: Because we were attacked for the first time by a non-state group.

JONSTEWART: In the 1930s, we had anarchists bomb government buildings.

JOHNYOO: They didn’t blow up and kill 3,000 people in New York City, either. They didn’t destroy the World Trade Center and try to decapitate the government, either.

AMYGOODMAN: That was former Justice Department attorney John Yoo.

In addition to calling for an investigation at home, Human Rights Watch says other countries should prosecute U.S. officials if the U.S. government does not pursue credible criminal probes. The report also details how WikiLeaks diplomatic cables reveal that U.S. officials have previously sought to curtail such investigations, as in the case of Spanish prosecutors pursuing a case against former top U.S. officials who authorized the use of torture.

For more, we’re joined here in New York by Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. And we’re joined in Louisiana by John Baker, professor emeritus at Louisiana State University Law School. He’s joining us from Baton Rouge from the PBS station WLPB.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Lay out the findings further, Ken, in your report.

KENNETHROTH: Well, we, first of all, begin by adding up all of the evidence that particularly the senior Bush officials ordered torture. And we look, for example, to the admissions that you mentioned of President Bush. There’s a similar admission in former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir. And there’s considerable evidence that people like George Tenet or Dick Cheney presided over the so-called principals meetings, where the interrogation policy was decided. So we’re not focusing primarily on the lower-level interrogators, but rather on the senior officials who ordered torture.

And what led us to issue the report now is that despite this considerable evidence, the Obama administration has done virtually nothing to pursue these serious crimes. The investigation that you just mentioned, the John Durham investigation, looked only at unauthorized torture—that is, people who exceeded their orders. But the problem was not the occasional interrogator who, in an excess of enthusiasm, went beyond the orders. The problem was the orders themselves. They allowed things like waterboarding, which was—is basically mock execution by drowning, a paradigmatic form of torture. And to exempt those kinds of extreme interrogation practices, just because some senior Bush official ordered them, is wrong. It’s a dereliction of President Obama’s responsibility to enforce the criminal law that he basically has, as you saw in the clip, said he will look forward, not back. He will stop torture by U.S. interrogators from now on, or really from the beginning of his administration, but he will not look at the torture of the Bush officials. And that really, in a sense—it abandons his duty as what you might call the prosecutor-in-chief to not simply abide by the criminal law, but to enforce it, as well.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor John Baker, your response?

JOHNBAKER: Well, first of all, there’s no definition of "torture." I mean, the throwing around of the word "torture" has been the problem in this whole thing. And there has not been the case made this morning that distinguishes what really is torture from broad accusations that they ordered torture. When you read those memos, much criticized by the antiwar left, you see that there was a serious attempt—you can disagree with it, but a serious attempt—to look at what the law was and to give legal guidance on that. That’s unprecedented. Other countries don’t do this. We take seriously our obligations.

And the idea that we would go and prosecute senior officials, the President and others, is simply beyond anything we’ve ever done in this country, and there’s no basis for it. I mean, if we’re going to have a situation where every time we have a change of party in the White House, that the new administration prosecutes the former administration, then we really are going down the path of some third-world countries. I mean, one can make a case against President Obama, for instance, that the use of drones to kill enemy—enemies in other countries is unnecessary, that instead we could capture them, and that he has gone well beyond self-defense. One can make that case. I’m not going to make it, but one can make it. I don’t want a future administration under Republicans coming in and talking about prosecuting Attorney General Holder or President Obama. I don’t think that that is healthy.

AMYGOODMAN: Ken Roth? Let’s get Ken Roth to respond.

JOHNBAKER: And I don’t think it is justified.

AMYGOODMAN: Ken Roth?

KENNETHROTH: All right. Well, first, with all due respect to Professor Baker, there is a definition of torture. It’s contained in the torture convention, which, Amy, you mentioned at the outset, an international treaty that the United States and 140-some other governments have ratified. And it says that torture is the intentional infliction of severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental. The kinds of techniques that we’re talking about clearly fall under that definition. A mock execution is a paradigmatic form of psychological torture. Everybody understands that. The U.S. has prosecuted others for engaging in that. That’s what waterboarding is. It’s mock execution by drowning. Similarly, imposing these painful stress positions on people for long periods, subjecting them to prolonged sleep deprivation, to extremes of hot and cold, to beating and the like, these are all classic forms of torture. I don’t think that’s really in dispute.

So, the real issue is, did the officials who ordered that kind of torture—should they be exempted just because they were members of the prior administration? Now, Professor Baker seems to say that it somehow—it politicizes the criminal law for one president to hold another to that law, to prosecute clear transgressions of the law. I don’t buy that. I think, and I think most Americans feel, that this nation is a nation of laws and that their politicians and government officials should not be exempt from that view. Now, obviously, there were some who took different points of view. President Nixon notoriously saw himself as the president and therefore above the law. But he was hounded from office. I don’t think anyone thinks that when an official like Bush or Cheney, Rumsfeld or Tenet commits serious violations of law by ordering the criminal act of torture, that simply because they were a senior official, they should be exempted.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to go to one of the key pieces of evidence against former President George W. Bush, has been his own words. This was an interview he did last November with NBC’s Matt Lauer, in which President Bush openly admitted authorizing the use of torture on prisoners.

MATTLAUER: Why is waterboarding legal, in your opinion?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Because the lawyers said it was legal, said it did not fall within the Anti-Torture Act. I’m not a lawyer. And—but you got to trust the judgment of people around you. And I do.

MATTLAUER: You say it’s legal, and the lawyers told me.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah.

MATTLAUER: Critics say that you got the Justice Department to give you the legal guidance and the legal memos that you wanted.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Well—

MATTLAUER: Tom Kean, who was the former Republican co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, said they got legal opinions they wanted from their own people.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Well, he obviously doesn’t know. I hope Mr. Kean reads the book. That’s why I’ve written the book. He can—they can draw whatever conclusion they want.

MATTLAUER: If it’s legal, President Bush, then if an American is taken into custody in a foreign country, not necessarily a uniformed American—

GEORGE W. BUSH: Look, I’m not going to debate the issue, Matt. I really—

MATTLAUER: I’m just asking. Would it be OK for a foreign country to waterboard an American citizen?

GEORGE W. BUSH: It’s—all I ask is that people read the book. And they can reach the same conclusion if they would have made the same decision I made or not.

MATTLAUER: You’d make the same decision again today?

GEORGE W. BUSH: Yeah, I would.

AMYGOODMAN: That was George W. Bush speaking to Matt Lauer. Ken Roth?

KENNETHROTH: Well, I mean, first of all, Matt was absolutely correct to point to these legal opinions, because the Bush administration basically shopped around for the right legal opinion. They went down the hierarchy in the Justice Department. They found a very acquiescent individual, John Yoo, who wrote a memo, which if you read that memo, this is not an honest assessment of the law. This is a very partisan analysis designed to legalize something that’s illegal.

Now, for the President then to say, "Oh, well, my lawyer said it was legal, therefore I can do it," that’s completely disingenuous. It’s one thing for a sort of a low-level interrogator, who may not know the origins of a legal memo, to rely on it. But for the President, for Cheney, who put pressure on the various lawyers to approve the torture, who chose the authors of these memos, to then rely on this legal opinion, that’s basically just, you know, turning lawyers into members of the criminal conspiracy. That should not be grounds for any kind of defense to charges of torture.

AMYGOODMAN: By the way, we did invite Professor Yoo, now a law professor at University of California, Berkeley, to be on the broadcast, but he declined our request. Professor John Baker, your response to what Kenneth Roth has just said?

JOHNBAKER: Well, first of all, Amy, did you notice how you biased the statement? You said that President Bush admitted that he ordered torture. He never made such a statement at all. What you’ve done is to leap from what he said, and you labeled it torture. The reality is, if you read those memos—and the thing that is being lost here is that if you are going to turn war into a criminal process, then you at least ought to pay attention to criminal law. Now, there’s been no mention here that the essence of crime is specific intent. And the reason I’m focusing on the definition of torture is because that is in the statutory definition. There has to be specific intent to inflict this serious harm. And the memos go through it in great detail as to whether or not such and such is a serious harm and whether there is specific intent. Secondly, completely lost in this is the defense of self-defense and defense of others. That affects the definition of torture.

AMYGOODMAN: Ken Roth.

KENNETHROTH: Yeah, well, on this argument of self-defense, again, with all due respect to Professor Baker, I would urge him to read the definition of the crime, because the crime focuses—

KENNETHROTH: —of severe pain or suffering. It doesn’t say it’s OK to impose severe pain if you have a good reason. It says, for whatever reason, if you impose that pain, it is a crime. So, you know, by Professor Baker’s view, if the interrogators were defending America, they could, you know, severely beat someone, they could rape the person, they can mutilate them. They could do whatever they wanted, because it was for a good cause: it was for self-defense. That’s not the law. The law prohibits the intentional infliction of pain or suffering in severe forms, regardless of the reason.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go back to John Yoo, the former Justice Department—

JOHNBAKER: Look, you don’t—

AMYGOODMAN: —attorney. John Baker—

JOHNBAKER: Could I come back in here, please?

AMYGOODMAN: Yeah, go ahead, for a quick second.

JOHNBAKER: Could I come back in here? Look, he simply doesn’t understand criminal law, because when you define a crime, it is not complete in its definition until you consider the defenses. So his narrowing of the definition is simply wrong. You know, I don’t know whether you teach criminal law, but you have to consider the defenses. And the definition of killing of another human being, of murder, depending on how you draft it, you don’t exclude the defenses. So, if you have a criminal code, which we don’t have at the federal level, what you do is you consider the offense, and you also consider the defenses. And what you’re doing is eliminating the defense. You’re saying that we can’t act in a legitimate way, even using force, to defend ourselves. And that is a completely absurd position.

KENNETHROTH: Yeah, let me just address that, because, first of all, Professor Baker, please don’t lecture me on criminal law. I was a federal prosecutor for five years in New York and Washington. I know exactly what I’m talking about. If the law were, as you say it is—

JOHNBAKER: Well, then you know what I’m talking about, that you can’t ignore the defenses.

KENNETHROTH: Let me finish. If the law were as you said it was, as long as the war were fought for defensive purposes, you would throw the Geneva Conventions out the door. You could do anything. You could mutilate prisoners. You could rape them. You could do whatever you want, as long as it was in self-defense. Believe me, that is not the law.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to go to former Justice Department attorney John Yoo—

JOHNBAKER: That is not what—that—

AMYGOODMAN: —who defended his role in drafting the Bush administration torture memos. As I said, we did invite him on the show. He declined, but he did have a debate with you, Ken Roth, on the Charlie Rose show, where he defended the use of aggressive interrogation techniques.

JOHNYOO: The laws of war are enforced. You know, the laws of war, where we treat each other’s soldiers, give them prisoner of war status and so on, are enforced by reciprocal treatment. And that’s the idea that if we treat them—

CHARLIEROSE: But that’s when you have two nation states.

JOHNYOO: I know. Yeah, exactly. And so, that’s the problem, is that we are fighting an enemy that is not a nation state, either in Iraq with the insurgency or al-Qaeda throughout the world. They do not provide people with POW treatment. They don’t have POW bases. As far as we can tell, they don’t take prisoners, or they behead prisoners. And so, the question is, what is the benefit that we’re getting, in this particular war, by providing POW treatment or providing them with the kind of treatment we usually reserve for nation state regular armed forces, when if you use this other standard that we can give them under the law, we have the possibility of getting more information through aggressive interrogation techniques that could stop a future attack on the United States?

CHARLIEROSE: What’s the answer?

AMYGOODMAN: In the same interview, Yoo claimed Israel had decreased suicide attacks by using enhanced interrogation techniques.

JOHNYOO: The Israeli commission found that the use of these kind of aggressive interrogation techniques went broader than it was authorized for. They also found that a number—a high percentage of suicide bombers are stopped by information gathered from these kind of interrogations.

AMYGOODMAN: Kenneth Roth, your response to John Yoo’s assertions that America’s enemies are not nation states, so they’re not entitled to certain protections, and the assertion that torture ultimately works?

KENNETHROTH: Well, John Yoo was confusing two different issues. He refers to prisoner of war status, which indeed is reserved for conflicts between governments that respect the Geneva Conventions. But the prohibition on torture transcends that. That applies to any prisoner, whether a POW or a terrorist. If you’re in war or, for that matter, if it’s a regular criminal matter, no one can be tortured. There is—it is an absolute prohibition that has nothing to do with reciprocity.

Now, as to the argument that torture works, I mean, we heard this most recently with bin Laden’s killing. You know, Cheney got on the air and said, "Aha! It was because of the enhanced interrogation techniques." But if you look closely even at what Cheney says, he never claims that it was the torture or the enhanced interrogation technique that produced the information. He would say, you know, prisoners who had been subject to this helped in the capture of bin Laden. And indeed, when you start looking more closely at the evidence, it turns out that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who of course was tortured 183 times under waterboarding, he lied about the key courier who ended up leading to bin Laden. So, even somebody who was subjected to these extreme forms of torture didn’t fess up the truth about what was going on. And if you talk to the professional interrogators, they will say that it’s far more effective to build a rapport with a person under interrogation and that that kind of voluntary cooperation is a much more valuable form to—of cracking these secretive criminal conspiracies than twisting somebody’s arm or subjecting them to waterboarding.

AMYGOODMAN: Professor John Baker?

JOHNBAKER: Well, on the first point, I agree with Mr. Roth that there is certainly a difference between the treatment accorded under a treaty as opposed to the torture provisions in our statute and well as the convention. And yes, there is a prohibition against torture of anybody. But again, we come back to what is torture. And Mr. Roth simply took the argument and expanded it. I’ve never argued that it is a general defense for everything. As Mr. Roth should know, if he was a former prosecutor, then when we look at self-defense or defense of others, it always depends on the particular circumstances. And if you read those memos, the circumstances were laid out. And carefully in the memos, they say, assuming that these are the facts and that these are only the facts and there aren’t any other facts, as the facts change, then it’s different. So, contrary to what Mr. Roth says and what many law professors believe, many who haven’t read this stuff or who don’t teach criminal law, there is a plausible argument in these memos. You may disagree with the argument. Lawyers disagree on all kinds of things. But to simply blanket and say that this was clearly torture, to me, is nonsense. It’s simply not good legal argument.

AMYGOODMAN: Ken Roth, I wanted to follow up on another point in your report, encouraging other countries to prosecute U.S. officials if the U.S. is not going to prosecute their own.

KENNETHROTH: Yeah, well, this is a serious problem. The United States regularly pushes other governments to prosecute their torturers, their war criminals. But when the U.S., as, you know, perhaps the most visible nation in the world, doesn’t abide by that same standard, it not only undermines U.S. credibility as a proponent of enforcing international human rights law, but it also sets a very visible negative example. I had this experience. I met a couple of years ago with the Egyptian prime minister at a point where we had just received evidence that a bunch of suspects, terrorism suspects, had been picked up and were being tortured. And I met with him in his office, and I pressed him to stop it. And without skipping a beat, he looked at me and said, "Well, that’s what Bush does." And now, that’s a cheap answer. We all know that. But it’s a politically effective answer. If a government as powerful as the United States is flouting its obligations to prosecute torturers, why do we expect anybody else to do that?

AMYGOODMAN: Should it be taken to the ICC, the International Criminal Court?

KENNETHROTH: Well, you know, unfortunately, the International Criminal Court doesn’t have jurisdiction over most of these cases. The only way it could get jurisdiction would be for the U.N. Security Council to hand it jurisdiction, and that’s not going to happen with the U.S. sitting there and exercising its veto. So, as a practical matter, I mean, we have a strong preference for domestic prosecutions. I think for Obama to live up to his obligation as prosecutor-in-chief and to authorize Attorney General Eric Holder to pursue these investigations, that would be the preferred model. But if that doesn’t work, the only real alternative is for other governments to prosecute under their power of universal jurisdiction. This is what Spain tried to do, and the Obama administration stepped in and stopped them.

AMYGOODMAN: And we know that from the WikiLeaks documents—

KENNETHROTH: Precisely.

AMYGOODMAN: —that trove of documents that are slowly being released. Julian Assange, as we speak, is in court. The significance of WikiLeaks for Human Rights Watch and gathering information, can you talk about that?

KENNETHROTH: Well, I have to say, the massive WikiLeaks leak largely confirmed what we already knew. I mean, it was, you know, I suppose, surprising to see that these State Department memos were reasonably well written. They were insightful. Their analysis wasn’t that far off from the analysis that Human Rights Watch researchers on the ground were providing. So, I didn’t see any great insights provided by the vast bulk of those documents, other than a kind of reconfirmation that the U.S. embassies are sort of seeing things as we see them. And the real issue is, what do they do about it? Sometimes they are pushing to protect human rights, but too often they’re not.

AMYGOODMAN: Final word, Professor Baker?

JOHNBAKER: Well, a couple of things. First of all, as to foreign leaders accusing us of ignoring torturers because people like Mr. Roth are accusing people in the United States of torture, when in fact the issue is whether there was or wasn’t torture. Secondly, this idea of universal jurisdiction in international law is highly controversial. Indeed, if there is universal jurisdiction, then there’s nothing left to sovereignty. If every country can extend its police powers beyond its borders, that’s a prescription not only for chaos; it’s actually a prescription for war.

AMYGOODMAN: Final question from what Professor Baker said, and this is to Ken Roth, when he said, well, then you should be looking at President Obama, their drone attacks killing civilians in Pakistan. What about that?

KENNETHROTH: Yeah, well, the drone attacks, the Obama administration says, are attacks on combatants. In war, you can shoot at the other side’s combatants. It’s very different from torturing somebody in custody. Now, Professor Baker says, oh, maybe there’s a self-defense argument. Let me say that there really isn’t, under any reasonable definition. But, you know, let’s bring that to a jury. The evidence is overwhelming that senior Bush officials authorized torture, more than enough for Eric Holder to prosecute, if Obama would just let him do that. He should.

AMYGOODMAN: We’ll leave it there. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and Professor John Baker, of Louisiana State University Law School, professor emeritus there.

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Tue, 12 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0400Former Military Interrogator Matthew Alexander: Despite GOP Claims, "Immoral" Torture "Slowed Down" Effort to Find Osama bin Ladenhttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/4/former_military_interrogator_matthew_alexander_despite
tag:democracynow.org,2011-05-04:en/story/ecd55c AMY GOODMAN : The death of Osama bin Laden has sparked a debate over whether torture of suspects held at places like Guantánamo helped track down and kill the al-Qaeda leader. As intelligence officials revealed more about the trail of evidence that led to disclosing bin Laden&#8217;s location, some have claimed the mission vindicated controversial Bush policies on harsh interrogation techniques. Congressman Steve King, a Republican of Iowa, tweeted on Monday, &quot;Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?&quot;
Meanwhile, New York Congressman Peter King, also the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, said bin Laden would not have been caught without the use of torture.
REP . PETER KING : Osama bin Laden would not have been captured and killed if it were not for the initial information we got from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after he was waterboarded.
AMY GOODMAN : That was New York Republican Congressman Peter King talking to CBS . Karl Rove, former adviser to President George Bush, said, &quot;I think the tools that President Bush put into place &mdash; GITMO , rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information &mdash; obviously served his successor quite well.&quot; The Obama administration has denied such techniques were central to finding bin Laden.
REPORTER : Can you say if there&#8217;s been any change in President Obama&#8217;s opposition to so-called &quot;enhanced interrogation techniques&quot;?
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY : No change whatsoever.
REPORTER : Were any results of such techniques used in helping to track down bin Laden?
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY : Mark, the fact is that no single piece of information led to the successful mission that occurred on Sunday. And multiple detainees provided insights into the networks of people who might have been close to bin Laden, but reporting from detainees was just a slice of the information that has been gathered by incredibly diligent professionals over the years in the intelligence community. And it&#8217;s simply strange credulity to suggest that a piece of information that may or may not have been gathered in &mdash; eight years ago somehow directly led to a successful mission on Sunday. That&#8217;s just not the case.
AMY GOODMAN : That was White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
To discuss the issue, we go to Los Angeles to talk to Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator who conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq, leading to the capture of numerous al-Qaeda leaders. His latest book is called Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist . He&#8217;s currently a fellow at UCLA&#8217;s Burkle Center for International Relations.
Matthew Alexander, welcome to Democracy Now! What do you make of this debate that is raging right now about torture and its effectiveness?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER : Good morning, Amy.
The debate is skewed at this point. And one reason why is because we don&#8217;t know all the details, and secondly, because a lot is being left out of the conversation. And let me talk a little bit about that. One of the things that people aren&#8217;t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Sheikh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as being Maulawi Jan. And the CIA chased down that information and found out that person didn&#8217;t exist, that al-Libi had lied. And nobody is talking about the fact that al-Libi caused us to waste resources and time by chasing a false lead because he was tortured.
The other thing that&#8217;s being left out of this conversation is the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed certainly knew the real name of the courier, whose nom de guerre or nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to have known his real name or at least how to find him, a location that we might look, but he never gave up that information. And so, what we&#8217;re seeing is that waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques, just like professional interrogators have been saying for years, always result in either limited information, false information or no information.
AMY GOODMAN : And yet, what&#8217;s happening now is being used by many to justify torture.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER : That&#8217;s correct. And, you know, when you look at the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques in the case of the trail of evidence that leads to Osama bin Laden, what you find is, time and time again, it slows down the chase. In 2003, when we &mdash; or &#39;02, when we have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have the person most likely to be able to lead us to bin Laden, and yet we don&#39;t get to him until 2011. You know, by any interrogation standard, eight years is a long time to not get information from people, and that&#8217;s probably directly related to the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times.
The other piece of the story that we don&#8217;t know yet is we don&#8217;t know how the CIA learned the real family name of the courier, who again, his nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. And we don&#8217;t know how the CIA got his real family name, which really was the key piece of information that led us to be able to monitor phone calls and emails and discover his first name, his full name, which led to us finding him and then him leading us to the compound. So, until we have that information, which we don&#8217;t even know if it came from interrogations or if it came from a source, then we really don&#8217;t have a complete picture of how we got to bin Laden.
AMY GOODMAN : Matthew Alexander, actually, that is a pseudonym, is that right? You prefer not to use your actual name?
MATTHEW ALEXANDER : That&#8217;s correct.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about your experiences in Iraq, specifically what you did. You were involved in well over a thousand interrogations.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER : I was a senior interrogator in charge of an interrogation team. I conducted quite a few interrogations myself, over 300. I went out with the raid teams on these kill-or-capture missions to try and kill or capture, you know, leaders of al-Qaeda specifically. The time I was on the team, we were hunting a man named Zafar, who was in charge of the suicide bombing operations in northern Iraq.
And what I found is a couple things, Amy. The first is that non-coercive techniques, time and time again, proved extremely effective against al-Qaeda, especially techniques that came from law enforcement that were based on rapport building.
Secondly, what I found is that when I first got on the raid team, the Army &mdash; probably over half the houses we raided in Iraq were the wrong house, because we were acting on very small intelligence tips that we didn&#8217;t have time to flesh out and get the detailed information that we needed to ensure we&#8217;re going to the right house. And I accept that that&#8217;s a major challenge when you&#8217;re conducting counterinsurgency. The problem I had on the team, as I describe in my book, is that we weren&#8217;t paying compensation or issuing apologies to the head of households when we raided these wrong houses. And that was something I was able to convince our commander to change, because I believed very strongly that if we didn&#8217;t do that, we were going to end up creating more enemies than we were taking off the streets.
AMY GOODMAN : And talk about the discussions you had, as an interrogator yourself, with those who believed that torture was the way to get information, and your own feelings about the most effective way to get information from a prisoner.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER : My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don&#8217;t torture because it doesn&#8217;t work. I don&#8217;t torture, because it&#8217;s immoral, and it&#8217;s against the law, and it&#8217;s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it&#8217;s also inconsistent with American principles. So, my primary argument against torture is one of morality, not one of efficacy.
You know, if torture did work and we could say it worked 100 percent of the time, I still wouldn&#8217;t use it. The U.S. Army Infantry, when it goes out into battle and it faces resistance, it doesn&#8217;t come back and ask for the permission to use chemical weapons. I mean, chemical weapons are extremely effective &mdash; we could say almost 100 percent effective. And yet, we don&#8217;t use them. But we make this &mdash; carve out this special space for interrogators and say that, well, they&#8217;re different, so they can violate the laws of war if they face obstacles.
And that&#8217;s an insult to American interrogators, who are more than capable of defeating our enemies and al-Qaeda in the battle of wits in the interrogation room. And American interrogators have proven this time and time again, from World War II through Vietnam, through Panama, through the First Gulf War. And let&#8217;s go back to the successes of American interrogators. You know, American interrogators found Saddam Hussein without using torture. We found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda Iraq, which helped turn the Iraq war, without using torture. And numerous other leaders that we have found and captured &mdash; another guy named Zafar, that I describe in my book &mdash; all these successes have come without the use of torture.
AMY GOODMAN : You say that the use of torture was al-Qaeda&#8217;s number one recruiting tool.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER : Yes. When I was in Iraq, I oversaw the interrogations of foreign fighters. And those foreign fighters, the majority of them, said, time and time again, the reason they had come to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse of detainees at both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. And this is not my opinion. The Department of Defense tracked these statistics. And they were briefed, every interrogator who arrived there, that torture and abuse was al-Qaeda&#8217;s number one recruiting tool.
And remember, these foreign fighters that came to Iraq, they made up 90 percent of the suicide bombers. They killed hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers. And so, this policy of torture and abuse did not make America safer. What it did was it caused the deaths of hundreds or thousands of American soldiers who are now buried at Arlington National Cemetery. So, this policy has been counterproductive in so many ways.
And one thing you&#8217;ll never hear the torture supporters talk about, Amy, is the long-term negative consequences of torture. They won&#8217;t talk about the fact that al-Qaeda uses it to recruit. They won&#8217;t talk about the fact that future Americans are going to be subjected to the same techniques by future enemies using our own actions as justification. They&#8217;re not going to talk about the fact that it makes detainees more resistant to interrogations as soon as they walked in the interrogation room, because they see us all as torturers. So they&#8217;re not going to talk about all these long-term negative consequences.
AMY GOODMAN : Matthew Alexander, you raise an interesting point when you talk about the morality of torture. You compare it to when the U.S. infantry gets bogged down in a battle.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER : Yeah, and it just &mdash; this is one of the things that surprised me most about the conversation, is this lack of faith in interrogators, that by some default, American interrogators aren&#8217;t good enough, and so we need these special tools to be able to break the law, to be able to do something that&#8217;s extremely immoral and forfeit the high ground, as one of my friends likes to say, so that we can do our jobs. And that&#8217;s an insult to us. Professional interrogators take that as a slap in the face. Any good interrogator who&#8217;s skilled in his profession understands the culture of the people he&#8217;s interrogating, respects that culture, uses it to his advantage by respecting it, knows that they don&#8217;t need torture to accomplish their mission. And this has been repeated time and time again. We don&#8217;t give exceptions to other career fields to break the law simply because their job is difficult. And interrogators don&#8217;t need those exceptions, either.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, Matthew Alexander, summarize, as you watch this conversation unfold, the fierce defense of torture by Bush administration officials now coming on television, saying it was President Bush that laid the groundwork, or his administration, and the interrogation techniques, to finding Osama bin Laden.
MATTHEW ALEXANDER : Well, the laying of the groundwork, if you will, of these techniques basically, I believe wholeheartedly, slowed us down on the road towards Osama bin Laden and numerous other members of al-Qaeda, not just bin Laden. And I&#8217;m convinced we would have found him a lot earlier had we not resorted to torture and abuse.
And one of the things that also gets lost in this conversation, Amy, is: what&#8217;s our ultimate national security goal here? It&#8217;s not to stop terrorist attacks. We cannot defeat al-Qaeda, we cannot defeat violent extremism, by stopping terrorist attacks. That&#8217;s an endless game of hide-and-go-seek. What we have to do is stop terrorist recruitment. That&#8217;s the only way to put an end to al-Qaeda, is when they can no longer recruit fresh fighters. That&#8217;s been the downfall of numerous terrorist organizations. And when our policies help our enemies to recruit, we end up losing in the long run. So, this policy of torture and abuse, what it did is it helped al-Qaeda recruit, it lowered our moral standing in the world, it sacrificed our principles, and ultimately it cost us more time to find bin Laden, and it will take us longer to defeat violent extremism.
AMY GOODMAN : Matthew Alexander, former senior military interrogator in Iraq, conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations. His latest book is called Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist . He&#8217;s a fellow at the UCLA&#8217;s Burkle Center for International Relations. AMYGOODMAN: The death of Osama bin Laden has sparked a debate over whether torture of suspects held at places like Guantánamo helped track down and kill the al-Qaeda leader. As intelligence officials revealed more about the trail of evidence that led to disclosing bin Laden’s location, some have claimed the mission vindicated controversial Bush policies on harsh interrogation techniques. Congressman Steve King, a Republican of Iowa, tweeted on Monday, "Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now?"

Meanwhile, New York Congressman Peter King, also the chair of the Homeland Security Committee, said bin Laden would not have been caught without the use of torture.

REP. PETERKING: Osama bin Laden would not have been captured and killed if it were not for the initial information we got from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed after he was waterboarded.

AMYGOODMAN: That was New York Republican Congressman Peter King talking to CBS. Karl Rove, former adviser to President George Bush, said, "I think the tools that President Bush put into place — GITMO, rendition, enhanced interrogation, the vast effort to collect and collate this information — obviously served his successor quite well." The Obama administration has denied such techniques were central to finding bin Laden.

REPORTER: Can you say if there’s been any change in President Obama’s opposition to so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques"?

PRESSSECRETARYJAYCARNEY: No change whatsoever.

REPORTER: Were any results of such techniques used in helping to track down bin Laden?

PRESSSECRETARYJAYCARNEY: Mark, the fact is that no single piece of information led to the successful mission that occurred on Sunday. And multiple detainees provided insights into the networks of people who might have been close to bin Laden, but reporting from detainees was just a slice of the information that has been gathered by incredibly diligent professionals over the years in the intelligence community. And it’s simply strange credulity to suggest that a piece of information that may or may not have been gathered in — eight years ago somehow directly led to a successful mission on Sunday. That’s just not the case.

AMYGOODMAN: That was White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

To discuss the issue, we go to Los Angeles to talk to Matthew Alexander, a former senior military interrogator who conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq, leading to the capture of numerous al-Qaeda leaders. His latest book is called Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist. He’s currently a fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations.

Matthew Alexander, welcome to Democracy Now! What do you make of this debate that is raging right now about torture and its effectiveness?

MATTHEWALEXANDER: Good morning, Amy.

The debate is skewed at this point. And one reason why is because we don’t know all the details, and secondly, because a lot is being left out of the conversation. And let me talk a little bit about that. One of the things that people aren’t talking about is the fact that one of the people that was confronted with this information that bin Laden had a courier is Sheikh al-Libi, who was held in a CIA secret prison and was tortured and who gave his CIA interrogators the name of the courier as being Maulawi Jan. And the CIA chased down that information and found out that person didn’t exist, that al-Libi had lied. And nobody is talking about the fact that al-Libi caused us to waste resources and time by chasing a false lead because he was tortured.

The other thing that’s being left out of this conversation is the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed certainly knew the real name of the courier, whose nom de guerre or nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had to have known his real name or at least how to find him, a location that we might look, but he never gave up that information. And so, what we’re seeing is that waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques, just like professional interrogators have been saying for years, always result in either limited information, false information or no information.

AMYGOODMAN: And yet, what’s happening now is being used by many to justify torture.

MATTHEWALEXANDER: That’s correct. And, you know, when you look at the use of waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques in the case of the trail of evidence that leads to Osama bin Laden, what you find is, time and time again, it slows down the chase. In 2003, when we — or '02, when we have Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, we have the person most likely to be able to lead us to bin Laden, and yet we don't get to him until 2011. You know, by any interrogation standard, eight years is a long time to not get information from people, and that’s probably directly related to the fact that he was waterboarded 183 times.

The other piece of the story that we don’t know yet is we don’t know how the CIA learned the real family name of the courier, who again, his nickname was Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. And we don’t know how the CIA got his real family name, which really was the key piece of information that led us to be able to monitor phone calls and emails and discover his first name, his full name, which led to us finding him and then him leading us to the compound. So, until we have that information, which we don’t even know if it came from interrogations or if it came from a source, then we really don’t have a complete picture of how we got to bin Laden.

AMYGOODMAN: Matthew Alexander, actually, that is a pseudonym, is that right? You prefer not to use your actual name?

MATTHEWALEXANDER: That’s correct.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about your experiences in Iraq, specifically what you did. You were involved in well over a thousand interrogations.

MATTHEWALEXANDER: I was a senior interrogator in charge of an interrogation team. I conducted quite a few interrogations myself, over 300. I went out with the raid teams on these kill-or-capture missions to try and kill or capture, you know, leaders of al-Qaeda specifically. The time I was on the team, we were hunting a man named Zafar, who was in charge of the suicide bombing operations in northern Iraq.

And what I found is a couple things, Amy. The first is that non-coercive techniques, time and time again, proved extremely effective against al-Qaeda, especially techniques that came from law enforcement that were based on rapport building.

Secondly, what I found is that when I first got on the raid team, the Army — probably over half the houses we raided in Iraq were the wrong house, because we were acting on very small intelligence tips that we didn’t have time to flesh out and get the detailed information that we needed to ensure we’re going to the right house. And I accept that that’s a major challenge when you’re conducting counterinsurgency. The problem I had on the team, as I describe in my book, is that we weren’t paying compensation or issuing apologies to the head of households when we raided these wrong houses. And that was something I was able to convince our commander to change, because I believed very strongly that if we didn’t do that, we were going to end up creating more enemies than we were taking off the streets.

AMYGOODMAN: And talk about the discussions you had, as an interrogator yourself, with those who believed that torture was the way to get information, and your own feelings about the most effective way to get information from a prisoner.

MATTHEWALEXANDER: My argument is pretty simple, Amy. I don’t torture because it doesn’t work. I don’t torture, because it’s immoral, and it’s against the law, and it’s inconsistent with my oath of office, in which I swore to defend the Constitution of the United States. And it’s also inconsistent with American principles. So, my primary argument against torture is one of morality, not one of efficacy.

You know, if torture did work and we could say it worked 100 percent of the time, I still wouldn’t use it. The U.S. Army Infantry, when it goes out into battle and it faces resistance, it doesn’t come back and ask for the permission to use chemical weapons. I mean, chemical weapons are extremely effective — we could say almost 100 percent effective. And yet, we don’t use them. But we make this — carve out this special space for interrogators and say that, well, they’re different, so they can violate the laws of war if they face obstacles.

And that’s an insult to American interrogators, who are more than capable of defeating our enemies and al-Qaeda in the battle of wits in the interrogation room. And American interrogators have proven this time and time again, from World War II through Vietnam, through Panama, through the First Gulf War. And let’s go back to the successes of American interrogators. You know, American interrogators found Saddam Hussein without using torture. We found and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda Iraq, which helped turn the Iraq war, without using torture. And numerous other leaders that we have found and captured — another guy named Zafar, that I describe in my book — all these successes have come without the use of torture.

AMYGOODMAN: You say that the use of torture was al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool.

MATTHEWALEXANDER: Yes. When I was in Iraq, I oversaw the interrogations of foreign fighters. And those foreign fighters, the majority of them, said, time and time again, the reason they had come to Iraq to fight was because of the torture and abuse of detainees at both Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. And this is not my opinion. The Department of Defense tracked these statistics. And they were briefed, every interrogator who arrived there, that torture and abuse was al-Qaeda’s number one recruiting tool.

And remember, these foreign fighters that came to Iraq, they made up 90 percent of the suicide bombers. They killed hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers. And so, this policy of torture and abuse did not make America safer. What it did was it caused the deaths of hundreds or thousands of American soldiers who are now buried at Arlington National Cemetery. So, this policy has been counterproductive in so many ways.

And one thing you’ll never hear the torture supporters talk about, Amy, is the long-term negative consequences of torture. They won’t talk about the fact that al-Qaeda uses it to recruit. They won’t talk about the fact that future Americans are going to be subjected to the same techniques by future enemies using our own actions as justification. They’re not going to talk about the fact that it makes detainees more resistant to interrogations as soon as they walked in the interrogation room, because they see us all as torturers. So they’re not going to talk about all these long-term negative consequences.

AMYGOODMAN: Matthew Alexander, you raise an interesting point when you talk about the morality of torture. You compare it to when the U.S. infantry gets bogged down in a battle.

MATTHEWALEXANDER: Yeah, and it just — this is one of the things that surprised me most about the conversation, is this lack of faith in interrogators, that by some default, American interrogators aren’t good enough, and so we need these special tools to be able to break the law, to be able to do something that’s extremely immoral and forfeit the high ground, as one of my friends likes to say, so that we can do our jobs. And that’s an insult to us. Professional interrogators take that as a slap in the face. Any good interrogator who’s skilled in his profession understands the culture of the people he’s interrogating, respects that culture, uses it to his advantage by respecting it, knows that they don’t need torture to accomplish their mission. And this has been repeated time and time again. We don’t give exceptions to other career fields to break the law simply because their job is difficult. And interrogators don’t need those exceptions, either.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, Matthew Alexander, summarize, as you watch this conversation unfold, the fierce defense of torture by Bush administration officials now coming on television, saying it was President Bush that laid the groundwork, or his administration, and the interrogation techniques, to finding Osama bin Laden.

MATTHEWALEXANDER: Well, the laying of the groundwork, if you will, of these techniques basically, I believe wholeheartedly, slowed us down on the road towards Osama bin Laden and numerous other members of al-Qaeda, not just bin Laden. And I’m convinced we would have found him a lot earlier had we not resorted to torture and abuse.

And one of the things that also gets lost in this conversation, Amy, is: what’s our ultimate national security goal here? It’s not to stop terrorist attacks. We cannot defeat al-Qaeda, we cannot defeat violent extremism, by stopping terrorist attacks. That’s an endless game of hide-and-go-seek. What we have to do is stop terrorist recruitment. That’s the only way to put an end to al-Qaeda, is when they can no longer recruit fresh fighters. That’s been the downfall of numerous terrorist organizations. And when our policies help our enemies to recruit, we end up losing in the long run. So, this policy of torture and abuse, what it did is it helped al-Qaeda recruit, it lowered our moral standing in the world, it sacrificed our principles, and ultimately it cost us more time to find bin Laden, and it will take us longer to defeat violent extremism.

AMYGOODMAN: Matthew Alexander, former senior military interrogator in Iraq, conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations. His latest book is called Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious Al Qaeda Terrorist. He’s a fellow at the UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations.

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Wed, 04 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400"Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War": Groundbreaking Journalist Mark Danner on Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2009/10/14/stripping_bare_the_body_politics_violence
tag:democracynow.org,2009-10-14:en/story/77f3ae ANJALI KAMAT : Just days after President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol have founded a new lobbying group on the Hill called &quot;Keep America Safe.&quot; The group’s mission statement reads, quote, &quot;By turning away from the policies that have kept us safe, by treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter, giving foreign terrorists the same rights as American citizens, launching investigations of CIA agents, cutting defense spending, breaking faith with our allies and attempting to appease our adversaries, the current administration is weakening the nation, and making it more difficult for us to defend our security and our interests,&quot; end-quote.
The group launched a web video this week lambasting Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to launch a Justice Department probe into whether CIA operatives broke the law while interrogating prisoners.
NARRATOR : He talked tough about defending those who defend the nation.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : I will be as vigorous in protecting you as you are vigorous in protecting the American people.
NARRATOR : And the reality?
BRET BAIER : Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to begin a new probe of alleged CIA interrogation abuses.
NARRATOR : A decision criticized by seven former CIA directors.
ANJALI KAMAT : One of the group’s co-founders, Deborah Burlingame, told Politico that the website would also feature the Bush administration’s memos so people can, quote, &quot;read the memos on enhanced interrogation instead of reading them through the lens of the media where they’re called [quote] ‘Torture memos’ when, actually, they’re lawyers talking about an anti-torture statute and how not to violate it.”
Well, back in what’s been called the &quot;reality-based community,&quot; civil liberties advocates have criticized Holder for not taking the probe far enough and only investigating cases where interrogators went beyond the limits prescribed in the so-called torture memos.
President Obama has repeatedly said he will uphold the law but wants to look forward and not backward. Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation last month, Obama said he would not interfere with the Justice Department investigation.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : I have said consistently that I want to look forward and not backward when it comes to some of the problems that occurred under the previous administration or when it came to interrogations. I don’t want witch hunts taking place. I’ve also said, though that the Attorney General has a job to uphold the law.
AMY GOODMAN : But the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond, announced late last month that he was pulling Republican staff off the committee’s own probe into CIA interrogation and detention policies. The move appeared to be a response to the Attorney General’s decision to launch the Justice Department investigation.
Well, our next guest has famously described the way this country deals with the continued revelations about torture as a, quote, &quot;frozen scandal.&quot; I’m talking about award-winning journalist, writer and professor Mark Danner, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times . He’s also professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and professor of foreign affairs, politics and humanities at Bard College. He’s the author of The Massacre at El Mozote , Torture and Truth , The Short Way to War . His latest book has just been published by Nation Books. It’s a collection of his dispatches about Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the use of torture in the US war on terror. It’s called Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War . Mark Danner joins us here in our firehouse studio.
Welcome back to Democracy Now! , Mark.
MARK DANNER : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : The title, Stripping Bare the Body ?
MARK DANNER : Well, that came from something that a former Haitian president said, Leslie Manigat, who was briefly president after the fall of Duvalier and was overthrown in a coup. And he talked about the fact that political violence strips bare the social body, the better to place the stethoscope and hear what’s really going on beneath the skin. And his point, I think, in general, was if you look at a society convulsed by violence, whether it’s a coup d&#8217;état, a revolution, a war, it is a way to see inside it to understand the different social forces that make it tick and that, during times of peace, very often tend to be invisible.
And the book is about really those moments of nudity, as he called them, when you can look inside, whether it’s Haiti itself, the Balkans during the wars of the mid-’90s, the Iraq war, the war on terror in which we&#8217;re looking at our own society, whether it’s through provisions that the Bush administration put in place to deal with terrorism or the decisions that the Obama administration has made in its aftermath not to pursue certain legal recourses. And all of these are, in President Manigat’s phrase, moments of nudity in which we can actually look at societies and try to understand what makes them tick politically. And that’s what the book’s about.
AMY GOODMAN : Let&#8217;s talk about that naked truth now. We’ll work our way backwards.
MARK DANNER : OK.
AMY GOODMAN : Obama and Bush and how the Obama administration is dealing with Bush, these torture memos, and what both Eric Holder is doing and not doing?
MARK DANNER : Well, the administration has taken a middle course, essentially. The President, as your viewers just heard, has repeatedly said he wants to look forward and not back, an interesting phrase and one that, if carried fully to its conclusion, would mean we would never prosecute anything, if we were simply looking forward. But it means, in essence, that there will be no broad, wide-ranging investigation into interrogation under the Bush administration.
Under this general umbrella of policy, the Attorney General has decided that he will look specifically at officials under the Bush administration who went beyond the particular provisions or decisions that the Bush administration decided the law actually allowed, which is what the torture memos, referred to, describe. In fact, according to the Bush administration, the Convention Against Torture allows waterboarding; allows confinement in small boxes; allows sleep deprivation for up to eight days; allows beatings; allows the use of insects and various other things to terrify detainees; allows the use of heat, light, severe cold, prolonged nudity.
I hope, indeed, they follow &mdash; Americans follow Dick Cheney and his daughter in their admonition to read the so-called torture memos. I think everybody should read them, whatever they’re called. I hope Americans go forward and broadly look at them, because it will alter the political attitudes in the country, I think, regarding these procedures.
In any event, the administration has decided, in the person of Eric Holder, that interrogators who went beyond those limits, which were rather broad, people who, for example, threatened detainees with drills, that they were going to drill into their heads, threatened to shoot them in the head or threatened to rape their daughters or rape their wives, things like this, those people will be investigated. But the ones who actually waterboarded will not be. So this is a classic decision to take a middle ground that will please no one. As mentioned in the intro, civil rights groups &mdash; human rights groups have criticized this very strongly. On the other hand, Republicans, in the person of the Cheneys, Kit Bond and others, have criticized the Obama administration nonetheless for starting a witch hunt of Bush administration officials, which clearly isn’t the case.
But as you saw in this lobbying group that Cheneys have now set up, the Republicans see rich political ground to be harvested in these issues. And this goes back really to three months after the attacks of 9/11, when Karl Rove stood up before the Republican National Committee and said, “Americans trust us to protect the country. You know, we can win on this terrorism issue.” And indeed, for two elections, they did win. And the Cheneys are now really trying to set up the Obama administration as an administration that’s weak, Democratic weakness, renouncing torture, renouncing the techniques that supposedly are needed to protect the country.
And I think there’s a very calculated strategy at work here, particularly in the event of another attack. That is, the Obama administration is being put in a position where if there is an attack on the country, it can be very vigorously blamed by the Republicans for leaving the country open to the attack by its supposed refusal to torture detainees. And we see this &mdash; we see another side of this in the debate over Afghanistan, where Republicans are very harshly criticizing the administration for its hesitation in not sending the full complement of 40,000 troops that General McChrystal has reportedly recommended. So you’re seeing on both sides this kind of preparation to undermine the administration in the event of a further attack, that it has left the country vulnerable, as of course Democrats do, in the Republican worldview.
So all of this &mdash; you know, President Obama, with all due respect, keeps talking about not wanting to look in the past, but in fact the torture issue is not about the past; it’s about the present, very much so. And our national security has very strong symbolic resonance among the American public. It isn’t simply about what the Bush administration did; it’s about what the Obama administration is doing and what it stands for. And the Democrats have taken, I think, a somewhat typical, middle-of-the-road position that leaves them vulnerable and pleases no particular constituency at all.
ANJALI KAMAT : And Mark, I want you to expand on your notion of the “frozen scandal.” We’ve all known that this country has been torturing.
MARK DANNER : Mm-hmm.
ANJALI KAMAT : For over four years now, these revelations came out, starting with Abu Ghraib. But you talk about this as a frozen scandal, where each time there&#8217;s a new revelation, there’s a new round of shock. But then, what happens next?
MARK DANNER : Well, it’s true, as you say, that we’ve known about these things for a long time. The first major press report on stress and duress techniques, as it was called then, was on the front page of the Washington Post in December 2002. The New York Times reported on waterboarding in 2004 in May. There was a rush of documents that came out, as you point out, in the wake of Abu Ghraib. I published a book on this in October 2004, which is about 600 pages. It was called Torture and Truth . And two-thirds of it were government documents that describe this stuff in great detail.
So, we like to think that our scandals are about revelation, which is to say, once you hear about something, my god, the society jolts to attention, the judicial and congressional machinery leaps into action, there are investigations, there’s punishment and so on. And that has not happened.
Actually, there’s been revelation. There have been gestures toward investigation. In the case of Abu Ghraib, a few lower-level soldiers have been imprisoned, prosecuted and imprisoned. But the actual policymakers, whose decisions we know about in great detail &mdash; we have these memos that Department of Justice officials wrote. We have an immense amount of material, thousands and thousands of pages, describing in great detail how the decisions were made to use torture. We have the Red Cross report, which I published last spring, which describes these techniques in great detail, how they were used, what sequence they were used in. We have the Justice Department and CIA document describing how they were used. All this stuff is out there.
And we like to think what prevents action is lack of information, but in fact it’s not information, it’s politics. And politics, at this point, have determined that we, in effect, as a society, decided not only to torture, but to live with torture. That has been our decision up to now. And I think we tend to console ourselves that this is a continuing scandal, and there’s a controversy about it. But in fact, though we talk about it a lot, the decisions on the part of the government have been made and, in a real sense, unchallenged. None of the people who made the policies have been prosecuted and even investigated. And the decisions have not been formally renounced. Though Obama has said he will not use these anymore, and I believe him, they are &mdash; torture in fact has gone from being an anathema, something forbidden and illegal under US law and international conventions, to being a policy choice. In effect, for example, if there’s another attack, the government can go back to using it. I mean, it’s essentially been defined as legal under the Convention Against Torture and under US law.
AMY GOODMAN : Iraq &mdash; fit Iraq into this story, as you do in Stripping Bare the Body , talking about it, as many do now, in the past, although the US has a full presence there right now.
MARK DANNER : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : A war is being waged.
MARK DANNER : Well, it’s an amazing American proclivity, I think, to, you know, look at a particular place, direct its imperial gaze there, the elite learns all about the country, we debate what’s going on in Mosul and Karbala and so on, the knowledge and the argument is furious for a few years, and then suddenly the gaze shifts elsewhere. It’s like a spotlight that goes now to Afghanistan and leaves Iraq, formerly brightly lit, in darkness. And we tend to leave ruins behind. And Iraq, I think, is a very good example of that, that suddenly it’s gone.
We can define it, if we want to, as a success. That is the way it’s talked about very often in the national press, one way or another. And in fact, of course, it remains an extremely violent place. The insurgency still exists. The United States essentially tamped it down for a time by renting the insurgency, by dividing it and hiring a good many of what we seem to refer to as the tribes &mdash; a very odd expression &mdash; but Sunni organizations in the center of the country. It is, as I say &mdash; there is still a very significant level of violence there. But for reasons having to do, I think, with Obama&#8217;s ascension, mainly, and the current political struggle over Afghanistan, what will be done there, we don&#8217;t talk about it anymore. It’s just left the national scene.
AMY GOODMAN : And what do you think needs to be said about it right now?
MARK DANNER : Well, I think one of the things I would like to say about it is that it is somewhat a lesson in how we make decisions and our national evangelism, our conviction, that seems to be ignited from time to time, that the United States, “with all its great power” &mdash; I put that in quotes &mdash; can alter, for its own good, a society that’s distant, complex, difficult to understand, and that has its own particular political strengths and dysfunctions.
We tend &mdash; I’m always astonished by how we talk about other countries. We&#8217;re doing it now with Afghanistan, that, you know, actually it’s a political problem. We have to nation-build. There was a piece on the front page of the New York Times in the last few days that talked about nation-building going too slowly in Afghanistan. And it always leaves me a bit breathless to look at this idea that &mdash; I mean, if you’ve ever seen foreign aid actually at work on the ground, you can’t do these things. You can’t change societies on this scale, particularly since US intervention &mdash; you know, it’s like trying to fix a watch in your own shadow, because you have the shadow of nationalism, which is to say, every US &mdash; bit of US forces that actually are on the ground cause their own very often extreme political reaction. So it’s impossible. It’s kind of an indeterminacy principle. You cannot intervene without a strong reaction, and very often a very strong reaction. And both of these societies, the Iraqi and the Afghani, have in common the fact that they’re strongly nationalistic and react very powerfully to outside intervention.
And the fact that we saw this in spades in Iraq seems not to be recalled in any way during the debate about Afghanistan, which is being carried on, it seems to me, largely because of domestic political reasons that stem in large part from decisions the Obama campaign made, while he was trying to become president, to balance out the fact that he was a dove on Iraq. He made very strong statements about the good war, the right war, Afghanistan and so on. And also, his original speech about Iraq, of course, said, &quot;I’m not against all wars. I’m against dumb wars,&quot; he said in 2002. And under that description, Iraq was &mdash; or Afghanistan, excuse me, was originally described or understood as the smart war. So here we are with a debate that, it seems to me, has a barely concealed, but absolutely determinate, domestic political component, that has very &mdash; relatively little to do with Afghanistan at all.
So, what would I take from Iraq? I would take that lesson, that when we seem to be talking about somewhere else, somewhere else that we’re going to affect very materially with our own power, we actually very often are talking about ourselves. And it’s something that we seem to repeat, and yet never learn.
AMY GOODMAN : Mark Danner, I want to thank you for being with us. I look for to continuing this conversation with you Thursday night at the New School. I’ll be in conversation with Mark at the New School Tishman Auditorium Thursday night at 7:00 p.m. And all are invited. Tonight you&#8217;re headed to Washington?
MARK DANNER : Washington, DC.
AMY GOODMAN : To Busboys and Poets?
MARK DANNER : Busboys and Poets, yes, 6:30.
AMY GOODMAN : And that’s on 14th Street. And folks can link to our website at democracynow.org; we’ll give all of those details . Mark Danner’s new book is out, a collection of his writings over the years. It’s called Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War . This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
MARK DANNER : Thanks.ANJALIKAMAT: Just days after President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, former Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol have founded a new lobbying group on the Hill called "Keep America Safe." The group’s mission statement reads, quote, "By turning away from the policies that have kept us safe, by treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter, giving foreign terrorists the same rights as American citizens, launching investigations of CIA agents, cutting defense spending, breaking faith with our allies and attempting to appease our adversaries, the current administration is weakening the nation, and making it more difficult for us to defend our security and our interests," end-quote.

The group launched a web video this week lambasting Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to launch a Justice Department probe into whether CIA operatives broke the law while interrogating prisoners.

NARRATOR: He talked tough about defending those who defend the nation.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: I will be as vigorous in protecting you as you are vigorous in protecting the American people.

NARRATOR: And the reality?

BRETBAIER: Attorney General Eric Holder has decided to begin a new probe of alleged CIA interrogation abuses.

NARRATOR: A decision criticized by seven former CIA directors.

ANJALIKAMAT: One of the group’s co-founders, Deborah Burlingame, told Politico that the website would also feature the Bush administration’s memos so people can, quote, "read the memos on enhanced interrogation instead of reading them through the lens of the media where they’re called [quote] ‘Torture memos’ when, actually, they’re lawyers talking about an anti-torture statute and how not to violate it.”

Well, back in what’s been called the "reality-based community," civil liberties advocates have criticized Holder for not taking the probe far enough and only investigating cases where interrogators went beyond the limits prescribed in the so-called torture memos.

President Obama has repeatedly said he will uphold the law but wants to look forward and not backward. Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation last month, Obama said he would not interfere with the Justice Department investigation.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: I have said consistently that I want to look forward and not backward when it comes to some of the problems that occurred under the previous administration or when it came to interrogations. I don’t want witch hunts taking place. I’ve also said, though that the Attorney General has a job to uphold the law.

AMYGOODMAN: But the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond, announced late last month that he was pulling Republican staff off the committee’s own probe into CIA interrogation and detention policies. The move appeared to be a response to the Attorney General’s decision to launch the Justice Department investigation.

Well, our next guest has famously described the way this country deals with the continued revelations about torture as a, quote, "frozen scandal." I’m talking about award-winning journalist, writer and professor Mark Danner, longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and the New York Times. He’s also professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and professor of foreign affairs, politics and humanities at Bard College. He’s the author of The Massacre at El Mozote, Torture and Truth, The Short Way to War. His latest book has just been published by Nation Books. It’s a collection of his dispatches about Haiti, the Balkans, Iraq and the use of torture in the US war on terror. It’s called Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War. Mark Danner joins us here in our firehouse studio.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Mark.

MARKDANNER: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: The title, Stripping Bare the Body?

MARKDANNER: Well, that came from something that a former Haitian president said, Leslie Manigat, who was briefly president after the fall of Duvalier and was overthrown in a coup. And he talked about the fact that political violence strips bare the social body, the better to place the stethoscope and hear what’s really going on beneath the skin. And his point, I think, in general, was if you look at a society convulsed by violence, whether it’s a coup d’état, a revolution, a war, it is a way to see inside it to understand the different social forces that make it tick and that, during times of peace, very often tend to be invisible.

And the book is about really those moments of nudity, as he called them, when you can look inside, whether it’s Haiti itself, the Balkans during the wars of the mid-’90s, the Iraq war, the war on terror in which we’re looking at our own society, whether it’s through provisions that the Bush administration put in place to deal with terrorism or the decisions that the Obama administration has made in its aftermath not to pursue certain legal recourses. And all of these are, in President Manigat’s phrase, moments of nudity in which we can actually look at societies and try to understand what makes them tick politically. And that’s what the book’s about.

AMYGOODMAN: Let’s talk about that naked truth now. We’ll work our way backwards.

MARKDANNER: OK.

AMYGOODMAN: Obama and Bush and how the Obama administration is dealing with Bush, these torture memos, and what both Eric Holder is doing and not doing?

MARKDANNER: Well, the administration has taken a middle course, essentially. The President, as your viewers just heard, has repeatedly said he wants to look forward and not back, an interesting phrase and one that, if carried fully to its conclusion, would mean we would never prosecute anything, if we were simply looking forward. But it means, in essence, that there will be no broad, wide-ranging investigation into interrogation under the Bush administration.

Under this general umbrella of policy, the Attorney General has decided that he will look specifically at officials under the Bush administration who went beyond the particular provisions or decisions that the Bush administration decided the law actually allowed, which is what the torture memos, referred to, describe. In fact, according to the Bush administration, the Convention Against Torture allows waterboarding; allows confinement in small boxes; allows sleep deprivation for up to eight days; allows beatings; allows the use of insects and various other things to terrify detainees; allows the use of heat, light, severe cold, prolonged nudity.

I hope, indeed, they follow — Americans follow Dick Cheney and his daughter in their admonition to read the so-called torture memos. I think everybody should read them, whatever they’re called. I hope Americans go forward and broadly look at them, because it will alter the political attitudes in the country, I think, regarding these procedures.

In any event, the administration has decided, in the person of Eric Holder, that interrogators who went beyond those limits, which were rather broad, people who, for example, threatened detainees with drills, that they were going to drill into their heads, threatened to shoot them in the head or threatened to rape their daughters or rape their wives, things like this, those people will be investigated. But the ones who actually waterboarded will not be. So this is a classic decision to take a middle ground that will please no one. As mentioned in the intro, civil rights groups — human rights groups have criticized this very strongly. On the other hand, Republicans, in the person of the Cheneys, Kit Bond and others, have criticized the Obama administration nonetheless for starting a witch hunt of Bush administration officials, which clearly isn’t the case.

But as you saw in this lobbying group that Cheneys have now set up, the Republicans see rich political ground to be harvested in these issues. And this goes back really to three months after the attacks of 9/11, when Karl Rove stood up before the Republican National Committee and said, “Americans trust us to protect the country. You know, we can win on this terrorism issue.” And indeed, for two elections, they did win. And the Cheneys are now really trying to set up the Obama administration as an administration that’s weak, Democratic weakness, renouncing torture, renouncing the techniques that supposedly are needed to protect the country.

And I think there’s a very calculated strategy at work here, particularly in the event of another attack. That is, the Obama administration is being put in a position where if there is an attack on the country, it can be very vigorously blamed by the Republicans for leaving the country open to the attack by its supposed refusal to torture detainees. And we see this — we see another side of this in the debate over Afghanistan, where Republicans are very harshly criticizing the administration for its hesitation in not sending the full complement of 40,000 troops that General McChrystal has reportedly recommended. So you’re seeing on both sides this kind of preparation to undermine the administration in the event of a further attack, that it has left the country vulnerable, as of course Democrats do, in the Republican worldview.

So all of this — you know, President Obama, with all due respect, keeps talking about not wanting to look in the past, but in fact the torture issue is not about the past; it’s about the present, very much so. And our national security has very strong symbolic resonance among the American public. It isn’t simply about what the Bush administration did; it’s about what the Obama administration is doing and what it stands for. And the Democrats have taken, I think, a somewhat typical, middle-of-the-road position that leaves them vulnerable and pleases no particular constituency at all.

ANJALIKAMAT: And Mark, I want you to expand on your notion of the “frozen scandal.” We’ve all known that this country has been torturing.

MARKDANNER: Mm-hmm.

ANJALIKAMAT: For over four years now, these revelations came out, starting with Abu Ghraib. But you talk about this as a frozen scandal, where each time there’s a new revelation, there’s a new round of shock. But then, what happens next?

MARKDANNER: Well, it’s true, as you say, that we’ve known about these things for a long time. The first major press report on stress and duress techniques, as it was called then, was on the front page of the Washington Post in December 2002. The New York Times reported on waterboarding in 2004 in May. There was a rush of documents that came out, as you point out, in the wake of Abu Ghraib. I published a book on this in October 2004, which is about 600 pages. It was called Torture and Truth. And two-thirds of it were government documents that describe this stuff in great detail.

So, we like to think that our scandals are about revelation, which is to say, once you hear about something, my god, the society jolts to attention, the judicial and congressional machinery leaps into action, there are investigations, there’s punishment and so on. And that has not happened.

Actually, there’s been revelation. There have been gestures toward investigation. In the case of Abu Ghraib, a few lower-level soldiers have been imprisoned, prosecuted and imprisoned. But the actual policymakers, whose decisions we know about in great detail — we have these memos that Department of Justice officials wrote. We have an immense amount of material, thousands and thousands of pages, describing in great detail how the decisions were made to use torture. We have the Red Cross report, which I published last spring, which describes these techniques in great detail, how they were used, what sequence they were used in. We have the Justice Department and CIA document describing how they were used. All this stuff is out there.

And we like to think what prevents action is lack of information, but in fact it’s not information, it’s politics. And politics, at this point, have determined that we, in effect, as a society, decided not only to torture, but to live with torture. That has been our decision up to now. And I think we tend to console ourselves that this is a continuing scandal, and there’s a controversy about it. But in fact, though we talk about it a lot, the decisions on the part of the government have been made and, in a real sense, unchallenged. None of the people who made the policies have been prosecuted and even investigated. And the decisions have not been formally renounced. Though Obama has said he will not use these anymore, and I believe him, they are — torture in fact has gone from being an anathema, something forbidden and illegal under US law and international conventions, to being a policy choice. In effect, for example, if there’s another attack, the government can go back to using it. I mean, it’s essentially been defined as legal under the Convention Against Torture and under US law.

AMYGOODMAN: Iraq — fit Iraq into this story, as you do in Stripping Bare the Body, talking about it, as many do now, in the past, although the US has a full presence there right now.

MARKDANNER: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: A war is being waged.

MARKDANNER: Well, it’s an amazing American proclivity, I think, to, you know, look at a particular place, direct its imperial gaze there, the elite learns all about the country, we debate what’s going on in Mosul and Karbala and so on, the knowledge and the argument is furious for a few years, and then suddenly the gaze shifts elsewhere. It’s like a spotlight that goes now to Afghanistan and leaves Iraq, formerly brightly lit, in darkness. And we tend to leave ruins behind. And Iraq, I think, is a very good example of that, that suddenly it’s gone.

We can define it, if we want to, as a success. That is the way it’s talked about very often in the national press, one way or another. And in fact, of course, it remains an extremely violent place. The insurgency still exists. The United States essentially tamped it down for a time by renting the insurgency, by dividing it and hiring a good many of what we seem to refer to as the tribes — a very odd expression — but Sunni organizations in the center of the country. It is, as I say — there is still a very significant level of violence there. But for reasons having to do, I think, with Obama’s ascension, mainly, and the current political struggle over Afghanistan, what will be done there, we don’t talk about it anymore. It’s just left the national scene.

AMYGOODMAN: And what do you think needs to be said about it right now?

MARKDANNER: Well, I think one of the things I would like to say about it is that it is somewhat a lesson in how we make decisions and our national evangelism, our conviction, that seems to be ignited from time to time, that the United States, “with all its great power” — I put that in quotes — can alter, for its own good, a society that’s distant, complex, difficult to understand, and that has its own particular political strengths and dysfunctions.

We tend — I’m always astonished by how we talk about other countries. We’re doing it now with Afghanistan, that, you know, actually it’s a political problem. We have to nation-build. There was a piece on the front page of the New York Times in the last few days that talked about nation-building going too slowly in Afghanistan. And it always leaves me a bit breathless to look at this idea that — I mean, if you’ve ever seen foreign aid actually at work on the ground, you can’t do these things. You can’t change societies on this scale, particularly since US intervention — you know, it’s like trying to fix a watch in your own shadow, because you have the shadow of nationalism, which is to say, every US — bit of US forces that actually are on the ground cause their own very often extreme political reaction. So it’s impossible. It’s kind of an indeterminacy principle. You cannot intervene without a strong reaction, and very often a very strong reaction. And both of these societies, the Iraqi and the Afghani, have in common the fact that they’re strongly nationalistic and react very powerfully to outside intervention.

And the fact that we saw this in spades in Iraq seems not to be recalled in any way during the debate about Afghanistan, which is being carried on, it seems to me, largely because of domestic political reasons that stem in large part from decisions the Obama campaign made, while he was trying to become president, to balance out the fact that he was a dove on Iraq. He made very strong statements about the good war, the right war, Afghanistan and so on. And also, his original speech about Iraq, of course, said, "I’m not against all wars. I’m against dumb wars," he said in 2002. And under that description, Iraq was — or Afghanistan, excuse me, was originally described or understood as the smart war. So here we are with a debate that, it seems to me, has a barely concealed, but absolutely determinate, domestic political component, that has very — relatively little to do with Afghanistan at all.

So, what would I take from Iraq? I would take that lesson, that when we seem to be talking about somewhere else, somewhere else that we’re going to affect very materially with our own power, we actually very often are talking about ourselves. And it’s something that we seem to repeat, and yet never learn.

AMYGOODMAN: Mark Danner, I want to thank you for being with us. I look for to continuing this conversation with you Thursday night at the New School. I’ll be in conversation with Mark at the New School Tishman Auditorium Thursday night at 7:00 p.m. And all are invited. Tonight you’re headed to Washington?

MARKDANNER: Washington, DC.

AMYGOODMAN: To Busboys and Poets?

MARKDANNER: Busboys and Poets, yes, 6:30.

AMYGOODMAN: And that’s on 14th Street. And folks can link to our website at democracynow.org; we’ll give all of those details. Mark Danner’s new book is out, a collection of his writings over the years. It’s called Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

MARKDANNER: Thanks.]]>

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0400Glenn Greenwald on CIA Interrogation Probe, Obama and Why the Media Failed on Covering Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/26/glenn_greenwald_on_cia_interrogation_probe
tag:democracynow.org,2009-08-26:en/story/821b2c ANJALI KAMAT : We turn now to the issue of torture. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed veteran federal prosecutor John Durham to look into whether CIA interrogators and contractors should be charged for the torture and abuse of foreign prisoners. Durham is already heading a separate probe into whether CIA officials broke the law in destroying videotapes documenting prisoner interrogations. The White House has opposed calls for a torture investigation but says the decision has been Holder’s to make.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney criticized the move. Cheney said in a statement that opening an inquiry into CIA interrogation practices was, quote, “a reminder, if any were needed,” of why some Americans question the Obama administration’s ability to protect the nation.
Holder says he ordered the probe in response to a Justice Department recommendation to reopen nearly a dozen prisoner abuse cases that the Bush administration had closed. Holder says he was further influenced by the 2004 CIA report on the prisoners’ torture and abuse, which he released on Monday.
The report provides accounts of interrogators threatening to kill and sexually assault a prisoner’s family, staging mock executions, intimidating prisoners with a handgun and a power drill, and blowing smoke on prisoners’ faces to make them vomit. One prisoner was grabbed by his carotid artery until he began to faint.
In an apparent response to the report’s release, the CIA declassified two memos on apparent intelligence gained from the prisoner interrogations. Cheney had previously claimed the memos would help vindicate the CIA interrogation methods by showing they yielded important intelligence. But the memos don’t describe any specific methods, nor do they assess their results.
AMY GOODMAN : The Obama administration, meanwhile, has confirmed plans to establish a new team of interrogators to question foreign suspects outside the CIA . The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG , will be operated out of the FBI and overseen by the National Security Council.
For more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com , the author of three books. His latest is Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics . He’s joining us now by Democracy Now! video stream.
Glenn, welcome to Democracy Now!
GLENN GREENWALD : Good to be here, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : Your response to these latest really profound developments in the last few days?
GLENN GREENWALD : They are profound. For one thing, I think Eric Holder&#8217;s announcement that there will be at least some investigation at least takes away the idea that all of this conduct, this torture regime, ought to be immunized from the rule of law and the mere fact that it was done in the name of terrorism means that somehow breaking the law is permissible in a republic that is supposed to live in accordance with the rule of law. So I think that’s a positive step.
I think the problem with the announcement, though, and it’s a significant problem, is that he has indicated that anybody who complied with the OLC torture memos, the memos that essentially gave permission to the CIA to engage in what was obviously torture, and who did so in good faith will receive immunity from investigations and prosecutions. And what that, I think, is intended to do, and what it almost certainly will accomplish, is to mean that the high-level political officials who actually implemented the torture regime &mdash; the Bush officials in the White House, the high-level CIA officials &mdash; will never be held to account. And at most what will happen is some low-level sadist in the CIA who went beyond the torture permission slips given by the Justice Department might be held accountable, in the same way that in Abu Ghraib low-level grunts were held accountable for what was clearly the policy of high-level policymakers. And I think that’s quite problematic.
ANJALI KAMAT : Glenn Greenwald, talk about the inspector general&#8217;s torture report. Your piece in Salon.com is called &quot;What Every American Should Be Made to Learn About the IG Torture Report.&quot; What should every American be made to learn about this report, and why?
GLENN GREENWALD : Well, I think the reality of the torture regime is so vastly different from what the media typically depicts. I think if you ask most Americans what the torture regime and what the torture controversy was about, they would say, understandably, that it essentially involved waterboarding, pouring some water down the noses of three al-Qaeda members who were involved in the 9/11 attacks. That’s what they understand it to be, because that’s what the discussions about are almost always about. The reality, though, is quite different.
This is yet another report that details that the abuses that took place were pervasive and systematic, far more than three people, involving hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, that they involved people who even the CIA report said there was no incredible intelligence to believe that they were involved in terrorism of any kind, meaning that they were completely innocent of any wrongdoing. These were the people to whom we subjected these abuses.
And I think, beyond that, the kinds of techniques, the kinds of tactics that were used, as you indicated in your opening, are incredibly brutal and barbaric, exactly the kinds of methods that we’ve long condemned and called for war crimes prosecutions when engaged in by other countries.
And most of all, it involves numerous detainees who weren’t just abused and brutalized, but who were murdered, who were killed in detention as a result of these, quote/unquote, &quot;interrogation tactics.&quot; The IG report talks about one detainee being beaten to death with a flashlight. And, of course, there are many others, including some that are discussed in the IG report, though those passages were redacted.
And so, my point really is that if Americans want to endorse the idea that torture is permissible as a means of combating terrorism and that that’s something that the United States is now going to do and that the people who did it, even though it’s clearly a felony and a war crime, should be immunized from prosecution, at the very least they should be made to understand what it is that they’re defending. They&#8217;re not merely defending the use of waterboarding; they’re defending the most brutal and horrific tactics that result in severe injury to helpless captives and even death. And if, at the end of the day, America wants to defend and justify that, then at least they will do it with full knowledge and will be making a clearer statement about what the country has become.
AMY GOODMAN : Glenn, can you talk about the media coverage of all of this?
GLENN GREENWALD : Well, I think that, you know, one of the things that is most noticeable about what ends up happening with media coverage is that it’s immediately framed as being a question of whether this is something we should do to protect ourselves. The chyron on CNN all day and the title of the debate on CNN the entire day after this report was issued was “How far is too far to protect ourselves?” So we’ve now almost implicitly accepted the Cheneyite premise that the only way that we can stay safe, the only way we can extract information about terrorist plots, is by drowning it out of people or beating it out of people. And so, the discussion becomes simply whether or not Americans are willing to have their government leaders engage in torture in order to stay alive.
And it’s a completely distorted way of presenting it for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that all professional interrogators say that by far the most effective means of extracting information is establishing a rapport and using professional interrogation techniques, not coercing and beating it out of people. But what it does, even more than that, is it excludes from the consideration all the costs, the moral costs to society, the reputational damage, the standing &mdash;- the loss of standing and credibility in the world, by becoming a nation that now tortures systematically, and more than that, becoming a country where we essentially vest our leaders with the power to break the law. We have laws in place, longstanding laws, that say it’s a felony to engage in torture. And torture is defined to include even things like threatening imminent death.
And so, if we start ignoring those questions, as the media almost entirely does, essentially what we&#8217;re becoming is a country that is both authoritarian, a country of torturers, and ones where our leaders have permission to break the law. And I defy anyone to look at network news discussions or cable news discussions and find any real discussion of those most consequential issues.
ANJALI KAMAT : Glenn Greenwald, talk about how these documents came to be released. This was not by an act of Congress or as a result of pressure from the mainstream media.
GLENN GREENWALD : I think that’s a really important point. You know, we have these institutions that are intended to exercise oversight, both in general over the executive branch and especially over the intelligence community. I mean, if there&#8217;s one thing the United States has learned, it’s that if the intelligence community is permitted to [no audio] -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re talking to Glenn Greenwald actually in Brazil by Democracy Now! video stream, so we’re going to try to get him out. Glenn is a constitutional law attorney and a political and legal blogger for Salon.com, has written a number of books &mdash;- his latest, Great American Hypocrites .
Glenn, continue with what you were saying. Just a little blip in the video stream there.
GLENN GREENWALD : Can you hear me?
AMY GOODMAN : We can hear you now.
GLENN GREENWALD : OK. So I was saying that, you know, the history of the United States is, you know, extremely clear that if the intelligence community operates without oversight, extreme abuses are inevitable. And, of course, that was the lesson in the mid-1970s, when the intelligence community was investigated and decades of abuses were uncovered. And that was when the oversight regime was created.
And so, we were supposed to have a heavy oversight regime exerted by Congress to ensure that they couldn’t operate in secrecy. The media, of course, is supposed to play the role of the fourth estate, the adversarial check on what the intelligence community is doing. And yet, if you [no audio] -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : Just bear with us. What he’s saying is very important, and so we’re just going to keep on trying to maintain this connection in Brazil. Again, our guest, the Salon.com blogger, constitutional law attorney Glenn Greenwald. Let’s see if he’s back with us. Glenn?
We’re going to try to call him on the telephone, often the best way to communicate with someone.
And we also want to let you know, at the moment of this broadcast, President Obama has yet to address the nation from Blue Heron Farms, where he’s staying in Martha&#8217;s Vineyard. And we do hope to bring you what he has to say about Senator Kennedy, his life, his legacy, when he does address the nation from Martha’s Vineyard.
As we try to reconnect now with Glenn Greenwald, who has been following the torture controversy for as long as it’s been going on and also taken the mainstream media to task for its coverage. He’s also been looking at the media coverage of the healthcare reform debate, which has been very interesting, and how the media has changed its stance as President Obama changes his stance. Let&#8217;s see if we’ve been able to reconnect with Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, we’re &mdash;-
We’re going to try to -&mdash; we’re going to try to reconnect with Glenn in just a minute. We&#8217;re going to go to a musical break, and then we’ll come back. This is a show very much produced just in the last hours. What we had originally brought you, of course, we changed, because in the early hours of today it was announced, just before 2:00 this morning Eastern time, that Senator Ted Kennedy had died, known as the “liberal lion” of the Senate, only two other senators who have served longer than he has, Robert Byrd and the late Strom Thurmond, as Senator Kennedy served forty-six years in the Senate. We’ll go to a musical break, and then we’ll come back. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We’ve tried to reconnect with Glenn in Brazil. We’re going to this time try by old faithful, by the telephone. Glenn Greenwald, the Salon.com blogger, as he talks about the issue of torture and the latest developments, Eric Holder appointing a special counsel to investigate the issue of torture.
But, once again, Glenn, talk about the limits on this investigation and if you think it will prevent future investigations from actually getting to the bottom of what happened and holding those accountable who were responsible for it.
GLENN GREENWALD : Right. Well, that actually relates to the point that I was making when the forces of technology intervened in our discussion, which is, unfortunately, almost all of the significant revelations have occurred, not as a result of Congress or the media or even the Justice Department, but as a result of human rights organizations, and especially the ACLU , tenaciously litigating against the government, filling in the gap, the void, of oversight and disclosure that these institutions have failed to perform. And that’s why the public record has become so enormous, almost unavoidable for the Justice Department to take action. And I think that’s why the pressure has built up on Eric Holder to do something.
And the question now is, what is it that he &mdash; what is it that he’ll do? Will this be a whitewash investigation where a few low-level sacrificial lambs are held up? Or will the truly responsible and culpable parties, the high-level Bush officials in the White House, including the President, who knowingly instituted an illegal torture regime &mdash; will they be held responsible?
And if you look at what the Attorney General said in how he defined the scope of the investigation and who it is who would receive legal immunity, he said that anybody who complied with the OLC memos, meaning only engaged in the torture the Justice Department said you could engage in, and did so in good faith, meaning with a genuine belief that they were acting legally, would be immunized. And presumably, the converse of that is that anybody who acted in bad faith, even if they did nothing other than what the Justice Department said, could still be subject to prosecution.
There&#8217;s ample evidence to show that all these OLC memos were were designed to be legal cover to enable the President and other officials to do what they knew was illegal. So the mere fact that these memos exist and say that these techniques, these torture techniques, are legal does not in any way mean that what was done was in good faith. In fact, there’s evidence that demonstrates repeatedly that many of these decisions were made before these memos were issued and these memos were issued retroactively to provide legal cover &mdash; the very definition of bad faith.
And so, if you look at what Holder said technically, it still leaves open the possibility that even the President and the Vice President and the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, high-level CIA officials could still be held to account under the law. As a practical reality, though, it seems as though they’re clearly structuring their investigation to target these extra-sadistic interrogators who went beyond the memos and to say that anybody who worked within the memos will be protected. And if they do that, I think it would actually subvert the rule of law rather than bolster it, by saying that high-level officials yet again are immunized and only low-level law breakers will be held accountable.
ANJALI KAMAT : Glenn Greenwald, this week President Obama also announced the creation of a new White House-supervised interrogation unit. It’s being known as HIG . Can you talk about what this is and what its relationship with the CIA will be?
GLENN GREENWALD : Sure. I mean, the principal idea behind it is that the CIA was never really intended to be an agency that engages in law enforcement investigations, detention and interrogation. They&#8217;re really there to gather intelligence. And so, it’s really always been the FBI who are the professional interrogators. And what this really is about is taking away responsibility from the CIA and making the FBI &mdash; returning primary responsibility for interrogation to the FBI and ostensibly providing more oversight and more limitations on what it is that can be done.
The central requirement is that there will be no interrogation methods authorized, at least for now, beyond the Army Field Manual, which, although it contains a lot of techniques that are highly controversial and coercive and that some people consider torture, certainly is much more restrictive than the interrogation regime implemented by the CIA during the Bush years.
And so, in a sense, you could say that you’d rather have the FBI overseeing interrogations than the CIA . Certainly, the FBI&#8217;s record was infinitely better than the CIA’s, where many FBI agents refused to participate in these enhanced interrogation techniques. They filed reports saying that what was being done was illegal and was torture. They were probably responsible for some of the earliest leaks to the public about the abuses that were taking place. And so, the FBI’s record is better than the CIA’s.
The real question, though, is, is this just bureaucratic shifting to enable a better face to be put on what will still be a coercive interrogation regime, or is the administration serious about abiding by the law? And if they&#8217;re serious, will that even withstand future terrorist threats or even a terrorist attack? And I think all of that remains to be seen. All things being equal, I’d rather have the FBI as the primary agency. I think it’s a good step, in that regard. But how much this matters, I think, well, only time will tell.
AMY GOODMAN : Finally, on a wholly different issue, Glenn, you’ve been writing about the changing media coverage of the health insurance reform debate. Just quickly go through that with us in the last less than a minute we have.
GLENN GREENWALD : Well, the debate has &mdash; the division has become one not between Democrats and Republicans, but within the Democratic Party, between the forces that typically serve industry interests, like the Blue Dogs and the centrists who want to mandate that people buy health insurance products but without a public option to keep costs low, which would be a huge bailout to industry, versus the Progressive Caucus, who usually loses, but it seems to be, at least for now, standing up for ordinary Americans by saying only a public option will keep costs low.
And the media is depicting this battle, yet again, as being the progressives who are impeding real healthcare reform and obstructing getting things done, as though the only responsible thing to do is to give in to industry and to force progressives to give up on their belief in a public option, which Obama ran on and won on, rather than the Blue Dogs giving up on their servitude to industry. And it just shows how the media is never a neutral arbiter in these debates [inaudible] &mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : Glenn Greenwald, we’re going to leave it there. Thanks so much for being with us, blogger at Salon.com.ANJALIKAMAT: We turn now to the issue of torture. On Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder appointed veteran federal prosecutor John Durham to look into whether CIA interrogators and contractors should be charged for the torture and abuse of foreign prisoners. Durham is already heading a separate probe into whether CIA officials broke the law in destroying videotapes documenting prisoner interrogations. The White House has opposed calls for a torture investigation but says the decision has been Holder’s to make.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney criticized the move. Cheney said in a statement that opening an inquiry into CIA interrogation practices was, quote, “a reminder, if any were needed,” of why some Americans question the Obama administration’s ability to protect the nation.

Holder says he ordered the probe in response to a Justice Department recommendation to reopen nearly a dozen prisoner abuse cases that the Bush administration had closed. Holder says he was further influenced by the 2004 CIA report on the prisoners’ torture and abuse, which he released on Monday.

The report provides accounts of interrogators threatening to kill and sexually assault a prisoner’s family, staging mock executions, intimidating prisoners with a handgun and a power drill, and blowing smoke on prisoners’ faces to make them vomit. One prisoner was grabbed by his carotid artery until he began to faint.

In an apparent response to the report’s release, the CIA declassified two memos on apparent intelligence gained from the prisoner interrogations. Cheney had previously claimed the memos would help vindicate the CIA interrogation methods by showing they yielded important intelligence. But the memos don’t describe any specific methods, nor do they assess their results.

AMYGOODMAN: The Obama administration, meanwhile, has confirmed plans to establish a new team of interrogators to question foreign suspects outside the CIA. The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, will be operated out of the FBI and overseen by the National Security Council.

For more, we’re joined by Glenn Greenwald, constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com, the author of three books. His latest is Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. He’s joining us now by Democracy Now! video stream.

Glenn, welcome to Democracy Now!

GLENNGREENWALD: Good to be here, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: Your response to these latest really profound developments in the last few days?

GLENNGREENWALD: They are profound. For one thing, I think Eric Holder’s announcement that there will be at least some investigation at least takes away the idea that all of this conduct, this torture regime, ought to be immunized from the rule of law and the mere fact that it was done in the name of terrorism means that somehow breaking the law is permissible in a republic that is supposed to live in accordance with the rule of law. So I think that’s a positive step.

I think the problem with the announcement, though, and it’s a significant problem, is that he has indicated that anybody who complied with the OLC torture memos, the memos that essentially gave permission to the CIA to engage in what was obviously torture, and who did so in good faith will receive immunity from investigations and prosecutions. And what that, I think, is intended to do, and what it almost certainly will accomplish, is to mean that the high-level political officials who actually implemented the torture regime — the Bush officials in the White House, the high-level CIA officials — will never be held to account. And at most what will happen is some low-level sadist in the CIA who went beyond the torture permission slips given by the Justice Department might be held accountable, in the same way that in Abu Ghraib low-level grunts were held accountable for what was clearly the policy of high-level policymakers. And I think that’s quite problematic.

ANJALIKAMAT: Glenn Greenwald, talk about the inspector general’s torture report. Your piece in Salon.com is called "What Every American Should Be Made to Learn About the IG Torture Report." What should every American be made to learn about this report, and why?

GLENNGREENWALD: Well, I think the reality of the torture regime is so vastly different from what the media typically depicts. I think if you ask most Americans what the torture regime and what the torture controversy was about, they would say, understandably, that it essentially involved waterboarding, pouring some water down the noses of three al-Qaeda members who were involved in the 9/11 attacks. That’s what they understand it to be, because that’s what the discussions about are almost always about. The reality, though, is quite different.

This is yet another report that details that the abuses that took place were pervasive and systematic, far more than three people, involving hundreds of people, perhaps thousands, that they involved people who even the CIA report said there was no incredible intelligence to believe that they were involved in terrorism of any kind, meaning that they were completely innocent of any wrongdoing. These were the people to whom we subjected these abuses.

And I think, beyond that, the kinds of techniques, the kinds of tactics that were used, as you indicated in your opening, are incredibly brutal and barbaric, exactly the kinds of methods that we’ve long condemned and called for war crimes prosecutions when engaged in by other countries.

And most of all, it involves numerous detainees who weren’t just abused and brutalized, but who were murdered, who were killed in detention as a result of these, quote/unquote, "interrogation tactics." The IG report talks about one detainee being beaten to death with a flashlight. And, of course, there are many others, including some that are discussed in the IG report, though those passages were redacted.

And so, my point really is that if Americans want to endorse the idea that torture is permissible as a means of combating terrorism and that that’s something that the United States is now going to do and that the people who did it, even though it’s clearly a felony and a war crime, should be immunized from prosecution, at the very least they should be made to understand what it is that they’re defending. They’re not merely defending the use of waterboarding; they’re defending the most brutal and horrific tactics that result in severe injury to helpless captives and even death. And if, at the end of the day, America wants to defend and justify that, then at least they will do it with full knowledge and will be making a clearer statement about what the country has become.

AMYGOODMAN: Glenn, can you talk about the media coverage of all of this?

GLENNGREENWALD: Well, I think that, you know, one of the things that is most noticeable about what ends up happening with media coverage is that it’s immediately framed as being a question of whether this is something we should do to protect ourselves. The chyron on CNN all day and the title of the debate on CNN the entire day after this report was issued was “How far is too far to protect ourselves?” So we’ve now almost implicitly accepted the Cheneyite premise that the only way that we can stay safe, the only way we can extract information about terrorist plots, is by drowning it out of people or beating it out of people. And so, the discussion becomes simply whether or not Americans are willing to have their government leaders engage in torture in order to stay alive.

And it’s a completely distorted way of presenting it for so many reasons, beginning with the fact that all professional interrogators say that by far the most effective means of extracting information is establishing a rapport and using professional interrogation techniques, not coercing and beating it out of people. But what it does, even more than that, is it excludes from the consideration all the costs, the moral costs to society, the reputational damage, the standing —- the loss of standing and credibility in the world, by becoming a nation that now tortures systematically, and more than that, becoming a country where we essentially vest our leaders with the power to break the law. We have laws in place, longstanding laws, that say it’s a felony to engage in torture. And torture is defined to include even things like threatening imminent death.

And so, if we start ignoring those questions, as the media almost entirely does, essentially what we’re becoming is a country that is both authoritarian, a country of torturers, and ones where our leaders have permission to break the law. And I defy anyone to look at network news discussions or cable news discussions and find any real discussion of those most consequential issues.

ANJALIKAMAT: Glenn Greenwald, talk about how these documents came to be released. This was not by an act of Congress or as a result of pressure from the mainstream media.

GLENNGREENWALD: I think that’s a really important point. You know, we have these institutions that are intended to exercise oversight, both in general over the executive branch and especially over the intelligence community. I mean, if there’s one thing the United States has learned, it’s that if the intelligence community is permitted to [no audio] -—

AMYGOODMAN: We’re talking to Glenn Greenwald actually in Brazil by Democracy Now! video stream, so we’re going to try to get him out. Glenn is a constitutional law attorney and a political and legal blogger for Salon.com, has written a number of books —- his latest, Great American Hypocrites .

Glenn, continue with what you were saying. Just a little blip in the video stream there.

GLENNGREENWALD: Can you hear me?

AMYGOODMAN: We can hear you now.

GLENNGREENWALD: OK. So I was saying that, you know, the history of the United States is, you know, extremely clear that if the intelligence community operates without oversight, extreme abuses are inevitable. And, of course, that was the lesson in the mid-1970s, when the intelligence community was investigated and decades of abuses were uncovered. And that was when the oversight regime was created.

And so, we were supposed to have a heavy oversight regime exerted by Congress to ensure that they couldn’t operate in secrecy. The media, of course, is supposed to play the role of the fourth estate, the adversarial check on what the intelligence community is doing. And yet, if you [no audio] -—

AMYGOODMAN: Just bear with us. What he’s saying is very important, and so we’re just going to keep on trying to maintain this connection in Brazil. Again, our guest, the Salon.com blogger, constitutional law attorney Glenn Greenwald. Let’s see if he’s back with us. Glenn?

We’re going to try to call him on the telephone, often the best way to communicate with someone.

And we also want to let you know, at the moment of this broadcast, President Obama has yet to address the nation from Blue Heron Farms, where he’s staying in Martha’s Vineyard. And we do hope to bring you what he has to say about Senator Kennedy, his life, his legacy, when he does address the nation from Martha’s Vineyard.

As we try to reconnect now with Glenn Greenwald, who has been following the torture controversy for as long as it’s been going on and also taken the mainstream media to task for its coverage. He’s also been looking at the media coverage of the healthcare reform debate, which has been very interesting, and how the media has changed its stance as President Obama changes his stance. Let’s see if we’ve been able to reconnect with Glenn Greenwald. Glenn, we’re —-

We’re going to try to -— we’re going to try to reconnect with Glenn in just a minute. We’re going to go to a musical break, and then we’ll come back. This is a show very much produced just in the last hours. What we had originally brought you, of course, we changed, because in the early hours of today it was announced, just before 2:00 this morning Eastern time, that Senator Ted Kennedy had died, known as the “liberal lion” of the Senate, only two other senators who have served longer than he has, Robert Byrd and the late Strom Thurmond, as Senator Kennedy served forty-six years in the Senate. We’ll go to a musical break, and then we’ll come back. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We’ve tried to reconnect with Glenn in Brazil. We’re going to this time try by old faithful, by the telephone. Glenn Greenwald, the Salon.com blogger, as he talks about the issue of torture and the latest developments, Eric Holder appointing a special counsel to investigate the issue of torture.

But, once again, Glenn, talk about the limits on this investigation and if you think it will prevent future investigations from actually getting to the bottom of what happened and holding those accountable who were responsible for it.

GLENNGREENWALD: Right. Well, that actually relates to the point that I was making when the forces of technology intervened in our discussion, which is, unfortunately, almost all of the significant revelations have occurred, not as a result of Congress or the media or even the Justice Department, but as a result of human rights organizations, and especially the ACLU, tenaciously litigating against the government, filling in the gap, the void, of oversight and disclosure that these institutions have failed to perform. And that’s why the public record has become so enormous, almost unavoidable for the Justice Department to take action. And I think that’s why the pressure has built up on Eric Holder to do something.

And the question now is, what is it that he — what is it that he’ll do? Will this be a whitewash investigation where a few low-level sacrificial lambs are held up? Or will the truly responsible and culpable parties, the high-level Bush officials in the White House, including the President, who knowingly instituted an illegal torture regime — will they be held responsible?

And if you look at what the Attorney General said in how he defined the scope of the investigation and who it is who would receive legal immunity, he said that anybody who complied with the OLC memos, meaning only engaged in the torture the Justice Department said you could engage in, and did so in good faith, meaning with a genuine belief that they were acting legally, would be immunized. And presumably, the converse of that is that anybody who acted in bad faith, even if they did nothing other than what the Justice Department said, could still be subject to prosecution.

There’s ample evidence to show that all these OLC memos were were designed to be legal cover to enable the President and other officials to do what they knew was illegal. So the mere fact that these memos exist and say that these techniques, these torture techniques, are legal does not in any way mean that what was done was in good faith. In fact, there’s evidence that demonstrates repeatedly that many of these decisions were made before these memos were issued and these memos were issued retroactively to provide legal cover — the very definition of bad faith.

And so, if you look at what Holder said technically, it still leaves open the possibility that even the President and the Vice President and the Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, high-level CIA officials could still be held to account under the law. As a practical reality, though, it seems as though they’re clearly structuring their investigation to target these extra-sadistic interrogators who went beyond the memos and to say that anybody who worked within the memos will be protected. And if they do that, I think it would actually subvert the rule of law rather than bolster it, by saying that high-level officials yet again are immunized and only low-level law breakers will be held accountable.

ANJALIKAMAT: Glenn Greenwald, this week President Obama also announced the creation of a new White House-supervised interrogation unit. It’s being known as HIG. Can you talk about what this is and what its relationship with the CIA will be?

GLENNGREENWALD: Sure. I mean, the principal idea behind it is that the CIA was never really intended to be an agency that engages in law enforcement investigations, detention and interrogation. They’re really there to gather intelligence. And so, it’s really always been the FBI who are the professional interrogators. And what this really is about is taking away responsibility from the CIA and making the FBI — returning primary responsibility for interrogation to the FBI and ostensibly providing more oversight and more limitations on what it is that can be done.

The central requirement is that there will be no interrogation methods authorized, at least for now, beyond the Army Field Manual, which, although it contains a lot of techniques that are highly controversial and coercive and that some people consider torture, certainly is much more restrictive than the interrogation regime implemented by the CIA during the Bush years.

And so, in a sense, you could say that you’d rather have the FBI overseeing interrogations than the CIA. Certainly, the FBI’s record was infinitely better than the CIA’s, where many FBI agents refused to participate in these enhanced interrogation techniques. They filed reports saying that what was being done was illegal and was torture. They were probably responsible for some of the earliest leaks to the public about the abuses that were taking place. And so, the FBI’s record is better than the CIA’s.

The real question, though, is, is this just bureaucratic shifting to enable a better face to be put on what will still be a coercive interrogation regime, or is the administration serious about abiding by the law? And if they’re serious, will that even withstand future terrorist threats or even a terrorist attack? And I think all of that remains to be seen. All things being equal, I’d rather have the FBI as the primary agency. I think it’s a good step, in that regard. But how much this matters, I think, well, only time will tell.

AMYGOODMAN: Finally, on a wholly different issue, Glenn, you’ve been writing about the changing media coverage of the health insurance reform debate. Just quickly go through that with us in the last less than a minute we have.

GLENNGREENWALD: Well, the debate has — the division has become one not between Democrats and Republicans, but within the Democratic Party, between the forces that typically serve industry interests, like the Blue Dogs and the centrists who want to mandate that people buy health insurance products but without a public option to keep costs low, which would be a huge bailout to industry, versus the Progressive Caucus, who usually loses, but it seems to be, at least for now, standing up for ordinary Americans by saying only a public option will keep costs low.

And the media is depicting this battle, yet again, as being the progressives who are impeding real healthcare reform and obstructing getting things done, as though the only responsible thing to do is to give in to industry and to force progressives to give up on their belief in a public option, which Obama ran on and won on, rather than the Blue Dogs giving up on their servitude to industry. And it just shows how the media is never a neutral arbiter in these debates [inaudible] —

AMYGOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we’re going to leave it there. Thanks so much for being with us, blogger at Salon.com.]]>

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0400New Yorker Correspondent Jane Mayer and British Attorney Philippe Sands on Bush Administration Torture and How Obama Should Address Ithttp://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/20/torture
tag:democracynow.org,2009-05-20:en/story/6aeba0 AMY GOODMAN : Today, we spend the hour on one of the most controversial legacies of the Bush administration: the use and legal justification of torture. In the weeks since President Obama released the torture memos, a former FBI interrogator testified to the inefficacy of the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, a former aide to Colin Powell said the interrogations were aimed at building the case for the Iraq war, and a coalition of advocacy groups has just launched a campaign to disbar twelve former Bush administration lawyers.
Meanwhile, in Spain, despite the opposition of the Spanish attorney general, Judge Baltasar Garzon has launched probes into the torture at Guantanamo as well as six Bush administration lawyers who provided the legal framework for the use of torture.
Here in the United States, just how much change or accountability the Obama administration will bring remains to be seen. Last week, President Obama reneged on a promise to release photographs showing the abuse of prisoners at overseas CIA and military jails.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA : The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further enflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger. Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.
AMY GOODMAN : Later in the week, President Obama invited further criticism for deciding to resurrect military commissions for prisoners at Guantanamo. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs defended the military tribunal system.
ROBERT GIBBS : The President, as I said, during the debate said that properly structured military commissions had a role to play. The changes that he is seeking, he believes, will ensure the protections that are necessary for these to be conducted, in order to reach that certain justice as well as live up to our values.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I’m joined today in the firehouse studio by two people who have been closely following the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners held overseas and helped expose many of its facets. Philippe Sands is a British attorney and professor at University College London, the author of the book Torture Team: Rumsfeld&#8217;s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values . The book uncovered the role of US government lawyers in authorizing torture. It’s cited as a key influence by the Spanish lawyer prosecuting the case against the six Bush administration lawyers.
I’m also joined by New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer. She is the author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals , for which she recently won the Ridenhour Book Prize and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.
We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I wanted to start off on the issue of the Spanish parliament, actually just in the last hours, yesterday, saying &mdash; well, Philippe Sands, maybe you can explain it, because it’s been hard to understand where Spain stands on this issue and on their crusading judge, Baltasar Garzon.
PHILIPPE SANDS : Well, Spain’s law has basically allowed its criminal courts to investigate international crimes such as torture and other international abuses for many years. That was the basis, of course, for the case brought against Senator Pinochet a decade or so ago.
The decision yesterday is merely a recommendation by the parliament to change the law and to limit its application to situations in which Spaniards are involved or the perpetrators are present on Spanish soil. It’s, as I understand it, only prospective; it only looks to the future, and so it has no effect on existing investigations.
But more to the point, in any event, the case brought against the Bush Six, the cases that Judges Velasco and Baltasar Garzon are looking at, do indeed involve individuals either of Spanish nationality or Spanish residency, so I don&#8217;t think this will have any effect for ongoing proceedings.
AMY GOODMAN : What about this pressure that’s being brought on the Spanish parliament and on everyone in Spain right now?
PHILIPPE SANDS : I think it may actually not be the case which is being investigated in relation to the Bush Six and the Guantanamo abuses, but the Israeli investigation, which has been undergoing &mdash; underway for some considerable period of time, and that has caused tremendous pressure to be brought to bear on the Spanish government from the Israeli government. And I’m not sure, to be honest &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : And that investigation is...?
PHILIPPE SANDS : That investigation concerns abuses in Gaza and other occupied territories. And I’m not sure -&mdash; what I’m not hearing is that there is any huge pressure from the Obama administration in relation to these issues. There have been high-level conversations and discussions. The criminal investigation is underway. The Spanish judges have sent what are called &quot;letters rogatory&quot; asking questions to the US Department of Justice. The Attorney General, Mr. Holder, has said he will treat those seriously and look at them properly.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, let&#8217;s look at the Spanish case here, the six people and who they are and where they come from in the Bush administration.
PHILIPPE SANDS : Well, the Bush Six, amazingly and coincidentally, are the same six lawyers I happen to have focused on. And in that sense, I think the book contributed to a catalyzing effect.
The lawyers that you’ve got, in no particular order of significance: Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney General and White House counsel; David Addington, who was Vice President Cheney&#8217;s counsel; Jay Bybee, who’s been very much in the news recently in relation to the second of his memos which has come out; John Yoo, who probably wrote large parts of that memo, still teaching at Berkeley Law School; Doug Feith, who was the number three in the Pentagon; and finally, Jim Haynes, who was Mr. Rumsfeld’s lawyer as general counsel.
I don&#8217;t think any of those individuals are going to be taking vacations in Tuscany in the foreseeable future.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go to Feith. You interviewed Feith, actually; is that right?
PHILIPPE SANDS : I did. And you can &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : Explain.
PHILIPPE SANDS : Well, I interviewed him in December 2006. I recorded the interview. I’ve produced a transcript of the interview. I’ve put it on the website of Vanity Fair magazine, so it’s available for all to see. People can form their own view.
He, during the course of that interview, confirmed the significance of the decision on the Geneva Conventions, that none of the detainees at Guantanamo could have rights under it, as a basis for moving forward, if you like, on harsher techniques.
And he, amazingly, when I first met him, denied that he’d had any role in the interrogation issues. I pointed out to him, when I was with him, that his name appeared on the actual memorandum signed by Donald Rumsfeld authorizing new techniques of interrogation. He changed his tune. But we’ve seen, more recently, other documents emerge, the Senate Armed Services Committee emerge, placing him really at the center of the whole operation.
AMY GOODMAN : Former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, one of these six lawyers named in the Spanish complaint, denies, as you said, directing the Bush administration’s torture policy. Well, an interview on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox earlier this year, Feith also criticized your work, Philippe Sands.
DOUGLAS FEITH : First of all, what I understand about the allegations about me, personally, I happen to know are just backwards, and they -&mdash; I’m being criticized for a position that I never advocated. And so, the facts are just wrong.
But there&#8217;s also a broader point of principle here, which is, what the Spanish authorities are considering doing is indicting people in the &mdash; former US government officials for giving advice to the President. And the idea that a foreign official can disagree with advice given to the President &mdash; they&#8217;re not talking about action, and they&#8217;re not even talking about directing people to take action. They’re talking about people who were advising the President.
What’s going on in Spain is implementing, essentially, an idea that a British lawyer has been proposing, a guy named Philippe Sands, who wrote an extremely dishonest book on the subject. So I knew that he was going around, and some other people were going around, trying to find somebody in Europe who could bring indictments.
AMY GOODMAN : That’s Douglas Feith. Philippe Sands?
PHILIPPE SANDS : He is &mdash; and he’s every author’s best publicist, because being on the O’Reilly show in that way, of course, is wonderful for an unknown British lawyer.
I have, as you know, recently published the paperback edition of the book. I’ve not changed a single word in relation to what I wrote about Mr. Feith. I stand by every word.
He has obvious concerns. He needs to set the record straight, in his view, to avoid investigations that are underway. He’s also subject to a disbarment application, I think, that’s been initiated this week. I think he faces very considerable difficulty. And I’m perfectly content to debate him at any time or any place, and I’m perfectly happy for him to make those allegations. They’re really without any foundation at all.
AMY GOODMAN : And, Jane Mayer, the other members of the Bush Six, this grouping that have been &mdash;- that the Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, is going after, where are they? What’s happening with them?
JANE MAYER : Well, various things. David Addington has actually not been heard from for quite some time. So -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : And his position was...?
JANE MAYER : His position was the lawyer to Vice President Cheney and then the Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney. And he was a very forceful character who really helped shape the &mdash; what they called the new paradigm, this whole legal understanding that put certain terror suspects outside the rule of law. He was very important in shaping that.
You know, some of the others, as mentioned, John Yoo is teaching at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. He’s got a full course schedule for the fall, so I think he’s coming back. And I think Alberto Gonzales is still looking for a job, from what I’ve heard.
I mean, these &mdash; they are &mdash; a cloud hangs over this group. And it obviously doesn’t help their reputations to have been named in this case in Spain. They are in the midst of a sort of a growing political furor over their role. And I think that it will be clarified somewhat &mdash; that is, their role &mdash; when the Justice Department has a study that’s coming out very soon. It’s an investigation into whether the lawyers could be faulted for justifying America&#8217;s embrace of torture. They basically made it possible, by coming up with decisions that said that these kinds of techniques could be legal. And the Justice Department has been spending five years looking at their role and is due to release a report possibly at the end of this month.
AMY GOODMAN : We’re going to go to break and then come back.
I know Vice President Dick Cheney, though he hadn’t been seen a great deal in the eight years he was in office, is now being seen a great deal and saying &mdash; raising this very issue. I mean, “What if you had Eisenhower,” I think he said, “going after Truman and charging him with war crimes for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”
We&#8217;re talking to Jane Mayer. Her book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals , has just come out in paperback, as has Philippe Sands’ Torture Team: Rumsfeld&#8217;s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values . We’ll be back with them in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : Our guests for the hour are Jane Mayer &mdash; The Dark Side is her book, The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals . She writes for The New Yorker magazine. And Philippe Sands is a British barrister, a British attorney. His book is called Torture Team: Rumsfeld&#8217;s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values , a lot of stories in the news around this right now.
But my question to you, Philippe Sands, is &mdash; so, you’re talking about, and, Jane, you’re talking about, these six people being afraid to travel abroad probably. But what about here at home? Why can they travel freely here?
PHILIPPE SANDS : Well, I think that there&#8217;s a big issue here. I mean, I’ve always thought that foreign investigations are not an end in themselves; they’re a means to an end, and it really must be for the United States to sort this out. I’ve testified on several occasions before House Judiciary and Senate Judiciary, and I’ve said on every occasion my deepest wish is for the United States to sort this out. That is only, I think, at an early stage of beginning to happen.
President Obama seems very torn. Does he want to be a rule-of-law guy? Does he want to be a move-on, realpolitik sort of guy? And he cuts and turns in different directions. I think he may be playing the long game. I think it is inevitable; there will have to be some sort of investigation in the United States.
The big question becomes, what sort of investigation? Jane has mentioned the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Department of Justice, which will produce, I think, a report very shortly, which will be very significant.
AMY GOODMAN : And who’s leading this report, Jane?
JANE MAYER : Who is leading it?
AMY GOODMAN : Yeah, who is doing this investigation? Who’s heading it up?
JANE MAYER : Well, it was done by non-political experts, who are basically the watchdogs of the lawyers inside the Justice Department. And it will be released by Eric Holder, the Attorney General.
AMY GOODMAN : And the issue of the Bush Six, they’re from a certain sector of the Bush administration. There&#8217;s no one in the military. There’s no one in the CIA . Why not? And also, it doesn’t go up the chain of command.
PHILIPPE SANDS : I think that that’s a very important question. I focused on the lawyers, because I am a lawyer, and I really, as I think I’ve said to you before when I’ve talked with you, couldn’t understand how lawyers, who had been to the finest law schools in the United States, could approve torture, which is what they did. And so, I focused on them for that reason.
But I focused on them also for another tactical reason. I never imagined that so soon there would be so much scrutiny in the United States. It didn’t really occur to me that it would be possible to really put these issues under the spotlight. And if it did happen, I didn’t think it could happen in relation to a former vice president or a former secretary of defense or a former president. So I focused on the next tier down. The key point is, they were enablers. But for the lawyers, none of this would have happened.
But at the end of the day, the key people are those who actually signed off on the decisions, right at the very highest echelons of government. And we now know that’s not just the Vice President, it’s not just the President, it’s not just Rumsfeld. There’s new material that has come out to indicate that Condoleezza Rice may have had a role in all of this. She has said, of course, she didn’t take the decision; she merely communicated the decision. I’m not sure that there&#8217;s much of a distinction to be drawn there. But it goes very high.
AMY GOODMAN : What is the evidence there?
PHILIPPE SANDS : Well, the evidence is one of the new documents that has emerged, which has had very little play here. It’s a chronology that is produced by the Intelligence Committee of the Senate in January of this year, detailing the circumstances in which the two torture memos, written by John Yoo, signed by Jay Bybee, were produced on the 1st of August, 2002. And that document was put out recently by Eric Holder, the Attorney General, who I think is very committed to getting to the root of what went wrong and what happened. And that document identifies two meetings that held in &mdash; were held in July 2002 and identifies by office, but not by name, the individuals who basically, it says, approved waterboarding at those meetings. And it included in the list of names Condoleezza Rice. That is pretty powerful evidence.
AMY GOODMAN : Jane Mayer, want to add to that?
JANE MAYER : Well, no. I mean, we’ve seen that she’s been struggling recently to answer questions in Stanford University and then a fourth grader put some questions to her at one point. And she’s having a very hard time explaining herself.
This is, you know, I mean &mdash; anyway, I think that, to me, what’s interesting is this is not going away. There seems to be a hope within the Obama administration that they could somehow move on, put this behind them. And what we&#8217;re seeing is it’s not really containable politically. They’re going to have to deal with it somehow.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been on the airwaves quite a bit in the past few weeks right now. This is a SOT , a clip, of Vice President Cheney. He has been defending the Bush administration&#8217;s torture of prisoners held overseas. He was appearing on CBS&#8217;s Face the Nation last week, fiercely defending the techniques he authorized, but denied they amounted to torture. He also called for the CIA to release full records of prisoner interrogations to prove Bush administration torture tactics yielded valuable intelligence. He was questioned by CBS&#8217;s Bob Schieffer.
BOB SCHIEFFER : Other people in the administration say, as a matter of fact, what we found out using these methods &mdash; and I mean, let&#8217;s call things what they are &mdash; waterboarding was one of the techniques that were used &mdash; that they really didn&#8217;t get all that much from that. You say they did.
DICK CHENEY : I say they did. Four former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency say they did, bipartisan basis. Release the memos. And we can look and see for yourself what was produced.
BOB SCHIEFFER : Well, Mr. Vice President, let me ask you this. I mean, I&#8217;m not asking you to violate any rules of classification, but is there anything you can tell us specifically that those memos would tell us? I mean, some information we gleaned, some fact that we got that we wouldn&#8217;t have gotten otherwise?
DICK CHENEY : What it shows is that, overwhelmingly, the process we had in place produced from certain key individuals, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, two of the three who were waterboarded &mdash; and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the man who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, blew up the World Trade Center, attacked the Pentagon, tried to blow up the White House or the Capitol building, an evil, evil man that&#8217;s been in our custody since March of ’03. He did not cooperate fully, in terms of interrogations, until after waterboarding. Once we went through that process, he produced vast quantities of invaluable information about al-Qaeda.
BOB SCHIEFFER : What do you say to those, Mr. Vice President, who say that when we employ these kind of tactics, which are, after all, the tactics that the other side uses, that when we adopt their methods, that we&#8217;re weakening security, not enhancing security, because it sort of makes a mockery of what we tell the rest of the world?
DICK CHENEY : Well, then you&#8217;d have to say that, in effect, we&#8217;re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America.
The fact of the matter is, these techniques that we&#8217;re talking about are used on our own people. We &mdash; in a SERE program that, in effect, trains our people with respect to capture and evasion, and so forth, and escape. A lot of them go through these same &mdash; same exact procedures.
BOB SCHIEFFER : Do you &mdash;-
DICK CHENEY : Now -&mdash;
BOB SCHIEFFER : Is what you&#8217;re saying here is that we should do anything if we could get information?
DICK CHENEY : No. Remember what happened here, Bob. We had captured these people. We had pursued interrogation in a more normal way. We decided that we needed some enhanced techniques. So we went to the Justice Department. And the controversy has arisen over the opinions written by the Justice Department.
The reason we went to the Justice Department wasn&#8217;t because we felt we were going to take some kind of free-hand assault on these people or that we were in the torture business. We weren&#8217;t. And specifically, what we got from the Office of Legal Counsel were legal memos that laid out what’s appropriate and what&#8217;s not appropriate, in light of our international commitments. If we had been about torture, we wouldn&#8217;t have wasted our time going to the Justice Department.
AMY GOODMAN : That’s former Vice President Dick Cheney speaking to Bob Schieffer on CBS’s Face the Nation . Philippe Sands?
PHILIPPE SANDS : The man &mdash; let’s face it, let&#8217;s call a spade a spade &mdash; is a torturer. And he should face what torturers should face: namely, a full criminal investigation. Waterboarding is torture. There are no ifs and buts.
I see that clip, and I see him rewriting history. What I show conclusively in the book, what we now know, is that the legal memos followed the fixation of a policy. In other words, the law followed the policy. The policy was to move to abuse. They found the small group of lawyers who could be relied upon to sign off on the dotted line. And that is what happened. That is now clearly established. And that is why the lawyers are in the dark.
And I find it astonishing and deeply sad that a former vice president of this country can still take to the airwaves and make those sorts of arguments, arguments that plays into the hands of foreign nations. I mean, if they’ve got memos saying these things can be done by the United States against others, then why can’t others use the same memos to do the same thing against US citizens? It’s absolutely shocking, and it is astonishing that the airwaves continue to give him the type of space to make these types of statements.
JANE MAYER : It’s also &mdash; I mean, one thing that’s interesting &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : Jane Mayer.
JANE MAYER : &mdash;- to me is it’s a false premise, if you actually know the details of these cases. And no matter how much data has come out, it seems that Vice President Cheney is impervious to the facts, which are, as we heard, when there were hearings in Congress the week before last, Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who was at the side of Abu Zubaydah and trying to interrogate him, said they were getting good information out of him simply by talking to him, simply by being knowledgeable about the culture that they were questioning him about. And that work &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : Let’s go to a clip -&mdash;-
JANE MAYER : OK.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash; of Ali Soufan.
JANE MAYER : OK.
AMY GOODMAN : Last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the interrogation of foreign prisoners. This is the former FBI agent, Ali Soufan, testifying. He’s behind a wooden screen. He’s calling the Bush administration’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques “slow, ineffective, unreliable and harmful.”
ALI SOUFAN : From my experience, I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as enhanced interrogation techniques, a position shared by professional operatives, including CIA officers who were present at the initial phases of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation. These techniques, from an operational perspective, are slow, ineffective, unreliable and harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaeda.
A major problem is it &mdash; it is ineffective. Al-Qaeda are trained to resist torture. As we see from the recently released DOJ memos on interrogation, the contractors had to keep requesting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods.
In the case of Abu Zubaydah, that continued for several months, right ’til waterboarding was introduced. And waterboarding itself had to be used eighty-three times, an indication that Abu Zubaydah had already called his interrogators’ bluff. In contrast, when we interrogated him using intelligent interrogation methods, within the first hour we gained important actionable intelligence.
This amateurish technique is harmful to our long-term strategy and interests. It plays into the enemy’s handbook.
AMY GOODMAN : Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent, testifying behind a wooden screen in Congress. Jane Mayer?
JANE MAYER : I mean, and so, what you have here is an eyewitness who’s contradicting the Vice President of the United States. The Vice President was not there. The eyewitness who was said we didn’t need to use these torture techniques.
And what’s interesting is, it wasn’t just the FBI agent Ali Soufan; there is a report that, in the New York Times , that the CIA officers who were there also opposed ramping up these techniques, and they wanted to stop. They wanted to stop using techniques that they thought were inhumane on Abu Zubaydah, and they were ordered to keep going by the political people back in Washington.
So, you’ve got people who are not at the scene who are making these decisions and counter-commanding the people who were at the scene, who really know something about what was going on.
AMY GOODMAN : And explain the sequence, from the FBI interrogating Zubaydah to the CIA doing it, why that happened.
JANE MAYER : Well, the FBI &mdash; Ali Soufan is one of the most knowledgeable counterterrorism officers in America. He’s fluent in Arabic, and he’s been trying to fight al-Qaeda for years. And he was brought in to try to get some information out of Abu Zubaydah in legal ways. But the CIA was ordered to take Zubaydah and do things to him that Ali Soufan, at the scene, said he thought were criminal. We now know that he also &mdash; and I described this in the book &mdash; he sent up word through the chain of command to the top of the FBI , saying, “I think that the CIA officers should be arrested at the scene,” because of what they were doing.
AMY GOODMAN : Who was the CIA officer?
JANE MAYER : Well, we haven’t got the names here, but we know who was at the top of the agency. And it wouldn’t have happened without the blessing of George Tenet, who was at the time the director. And so, at any rate, those techniques moved forward. And as we now know, as Ali Soufan says, they had to do this eighty-three times to Abu Zubaydah before they were satisfied.
AMY GOODMAN : The role of medical professionals. I was just on this many city tour, and I was in Spokane. We weren’t far from the American Legion building, where Mitchell Jessen is located, about a 120-person firm. Explain Mitchell Jessen, where it fits into this story, right to the latest torture memos that actually President Obama had posted online.
JANE MAYER : Yeah, and also what &mdash;- we just heard Vice President Cheney say, “Oh, well, we didn’t do anything to these people that we don’t do to our own people in training.” And he mentioned the SERE program, which is the training program where they take US soldiers who might possibly be taken captive by an immoral, unethical enemy that doesn’t abide by any law, and they subject them to a little taste of what torture might be like.
That program, the SERE program, has psychologists who work in it and oversee the training in order to make sure that the soldiers don&#8217;t freak out completely.
AMY GOODMAN : Survival, Evasion, Resistance...
JANE MAYER : Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape is what the program is called, SERE .
And two of those military psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, got involved very early on in designing what became the United States’ interrogation program. What they did was they reverse-engineered. They took tactics that were designed by the Chinese communists, by the Stalinist show trials, by various tyrannical states, to get false confessions out of people. They took those techniques, and, amazingly, they became the template for what the United States started doing to people who were in our custody. So -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go now to the issue of Nancy Pelosi. Some unusual things have happened as a result of, well, the Republicans saying that she knew, that she was briefed. In fact, I think Newt Gingrich has just written a letter saying she should step down as the Speaker of the House. He was once the Speaker of the House and was forced to step down. But it’s going to an interesting issue, which is, the Republicans, of course, against a commission, an investigation, now they&#8217;re calling for it. The question is whether it will backfire.
But let&#8217;s go to this question of who knew about the use of torture and when they knew it, a central question now, Republicans pointing to the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s involvement in the torture briefings, and not just the Republicans saying this. After the CIA released documents last week showing Pelosi was briefed on waterboarding back in September 2002, she insisted she was told waterboarding wasn’t being used then and said secrecy rules forced her to remain silent when she learned more later.
REP . NANCY PELOSI : The CIA briefed me only once on enhanced interrogation techniques in September 2002 in my capacity as ranking member of the Intelligence Committee. I was informed then that the Department of Justice opinions had concluded that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques were legal. The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed.
AMY GOODMAN : Nancy Pelosi. Jane Mayer?
JANE MAYER : Well, you know, it’s interesting that it may result in pushing ahead the investigations. You know, the Republicans may have sort of stepped in it in a way. So, she&#8217;s been calling for an independent investigation, as well. So whatever implication there is of her in this process, it hasn’t stopped her from calling for an investigation.
AMY GOODMAN : And your sense of what she knew and when she knew it?
JANE MAYER : You know, I don&#8217;t think any of us really knows exactly, but I do think it is completely possible that there were honest misunderstandings that took place in those briefings, because what the CIA said to many people &mdash; and I don&#8217;t know specifically what they said to Pelosi, but what they said again was, “We are only doing to these detainees what we do to our own people in training.” So it made it sound like it was relatively innocent to many people who did not understand the second part of this, which was what we do to our own people in training is we torture them. And so, it is &mdash; I think many people who got these briefings had the failure of imagination to understand what was going on, or else they didn’t really follow up and want to know. And I don’t know what happened with her.
AMY GOODMAN : We’re talking Bob Graham of Florida, the senator, Jay Rockefeller.
JANE MAYER : I was talking to Bob Graham. Bob Graham absolutely denies that he was told that Abu Zubaydah was going to be waterboarded. And he also says that the CIA’s dates are wrong in describing when he was in these briefings. And he keeps, you know, quite famously, a diary of everything he ever does. So I went back and checked. You know, and there’s sort of an interesting statement from the current CIA director about these briefings, where he basically said, “You know, this was seven years ago, and we’re relying on people&#8217;s memories, and memories may be fallible, basically.” There&#8217;s kind of a little wiggle room on all sides in this.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you surprised that the current CIA director is coming down so forcefully on this issue in defending the CIA ? It’s not as if he comes out of the CIA establishment.
JANE MAYER : You know, I think he has felt that it’s important to win the loyalty of the people inside the building. You know, that’s what people tell me. And he’s met a lot of them by now. And I guess that’s &mdash;- you know, he seems to be taking that role.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to break, and we’re going to come back. We’re talking about Leon Panetta, who is also fellow California -&mdash;
JANE MAYER : That is true, very uncomfortably.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash; with Nancy Pelosi.
JANE MAYER : And I think an old friend of Nancy Pelosi’s.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, Jane Mayer and Philippe Sands are our guests for the hour. We’re talking about the issue of torture. We’re also going to talk about the military commissions, whether they will go on, and the Congress saying no to funding the closing of Guantanamo, and what this means overall for President Obama&#8217;s agenda and his reversal on the issue of pictures.
Philippe Sands&#8217; book is called Torture Team: Rumsfeld&#8217;s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values . Jane Mayer&#8217;s is The Dark Side . They’re both now out in paperback, have done groundbreaking work on torture and exposing it in this country and around the world.
Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re spending the hour with two people who have been exposing the issue of torture in this country for years now, writing breaking pieces, both writing books. Jane Mayer&#8217;s book is called The Dark Side . She was a National Book Award finalist. She just won the Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Philippe Sands is a British barrister, a British lawyer, who wrote the Torture Team: Rumsfeld&#8217;s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values .
The issue of the pictures &mdash; Jane, I want to ask you about this. You had President Obama clearly talking about the importance of transparency and photographs, and now they’ve gone back. President Obama has done just a complete reversal on this and said, no, they’re not going to release them. I couldn’t help but notice it was after Vice President Cheney&#8217;s going on &mdash; I don’t know about every network, but on a number of networks and speaking out, speaking out, that his campaign may actually be quite successful.
JANE MAYER : I just don&#8217;t know if it was really Cheney that pushed them back. It seems to me that what pushed them back was kind of the military establishment. It was General Odierno, in particular, who was the commander in Iraq at the time that these pictures and this abuse took place. So, I mean, there was kind of a self-interested aspect to the advice not to release these pictures from General Odierno, which I don&#8217;t think people have examined that much.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain.
JANE MAYER : But &mdash; well, I mean, these pictures were of abuse that took place on his watch. And if you go up the chain of command, inevitably you would get to the general who’s saying, “Don&#8217;t release the pictures.”
So, you know, I think that &mdash; you know, that it seems that Obama is trying to sort of split the baby in half and keep some kind of &mdash; keep the military establishment on his side, the intelligence establishment on his side. He’s arguing that these would inflame anti-Americanism and might endanger soldiers out in the field.
AMY GOODMAN : And General McChrystal, now replacing McKiernan in Afghanistan, known for being in charge of, well, in Iraq at a time when the prisoners were being abused there at Abu Ghraib?
JANE MAYER : Yeah, I mean, he has a &mdash; you know, it depends who you talk to &mdash; a mixed reputation. Some people think he’s fantastic. I think what happened was, he changed his view on some of these things. And so, after Abu Ghraib, everybody sort of pulled back from using really abusive tactics in Iraq, as they had used before the pictures of Abu Ghraib came out. And McChrystal, though, was overseeing Special Forces. And a lot of very bad things happened in the hands of the Special Forces in Iraq in around 2003, during the insurgency. People were just rounded up and subjected to awful abuse. And it’s been described; I describe it in my book. It upset some very good officers who tried to stop it. And so, you know, there’s a lot to hide.
And I think the problem for Obama here is, by not opening up the worst stuff from the Bush years, he may be in danger of becoming part of a cover-up. And he really &mdash; I don&#8217;t think he really wants to be in that position politically. At the same time, I understand &mdash; I’ve talked to people in the White House. They do not want to be distracted by this forever. They’ve got a very positive agenda that they want to push forward. They see this as Bush&#8217;s problems. They don’t want to be tied up in it forever.
AMY GOODMAN : Or they’re tying themselves in it forever.
JANE MAYER : You know, they really don’t want &mdash; they have inherited this mess. So I have a certain amount of sympathy for them, in that they want this to go away.
AMY GOODMAN : Philippe Sands, do you have the same sympathy?
PHILIPPE SANDS : It’s not going to go away. I mean, history tells you, in Chile, in Argentina, in other parts of the world &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : You worked on the Augusto Pinochet case.
PHILIPPE SANDS : &mdash;- these cases do not go away. That’s what history teaches you. You can’t bury your head in the sand and hope that you will draw a line and no one will talk about it anymore. It will go on and on.
And my fear with these photographs is that they are taking steps which will inevitably delay the day of reckoning. It’s the same thing in relation to investigations. What’s significant about these photographs &mdash;- and I think this has not been fully appreciated -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : And we&#8217;re talking about &mdash; they’re talking about something like forty of them, but we&#8217;re talking actually thousands, is that right?
PHILIPPE SANDS : Right, there are thousands.
JANE MAYER : There are thousands.
PHILIPPE SANDS : There are thousands of photographs. They are talking about releasing forty-four. And the significance of them is that they are not limited to Iraq. They include Afghanistan and Bagram, and they include Guantanamo.
And the release of the photographs is significant, because it will give full force to the lie that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were a few bad eggs. What will become impossible to withstand is the recognition that the abuse was the result of policy decisions and legal advices and was widespread.
We know some of the images that have been the subject of this litigation. It’s not right for President Obama to say these are not particularly inflammatory images. We know some of the stuff that is going to be coming.
AMY GOODMAN : And they are?
PHILIPPE SANDS : And it includes photographs, I’m told, of people&#8217;s heads being partly shaved, so that a cross is placed on the head of a Muslim man. That is one image that I understand is out there. They’re going to come out at some point. They ought to be gotten out sooner rather than later, and at that point people can then begin the process of moving on.
And coming back, I think, to the earlier point, it’s the same in relation to the issue of investigations. It’s not a party political issue. I completely subscribe to the view that Jane has just explained in relation to what Nancy Pelosi has said, but we shouldn’t be partisan about this. If there was knowledge, it doesn’t matter whether it was Independents or Republicans or Democrats. We need a full investigation. It needs to come out.
AMY GOODMAN : I want to go to the role of a judge &mdash; now judge; he was then just Jay Bybee &mdash; who signed off on two of the torture memos released last month by President Obama. He signed the memos when he was Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel. Six months later, he breezed through his confirmation hearing for his appointment to the federal appeals court, and Congress voted him to a lifetime on the bench.
This is excerpts of a piece by David Murdock for the American News Project that looks into this very question, using interviews with attorney Scott Horton and Yale University law professor Bruce Ackerman.
BRUCE ACKERMAN : Without his authorization, the members of the CIA may well not have done it at all. Or, if they had, they would be plainly subject to criminal responsibility today. So these memos are at the absolute center of the torture activities of the United States government. This is not a minor matter. This is the foundation of our activities. Without these memos, the entire exercise of torture probably would not have taken place.
SCOTT HORTON : Well, if we go back and check this against the timeline, we see these memoranda, you know, issued at the beginning of August, prepared, you know, perhaps a few weeks before that. This stacks up with the time when Jay Bybee is in transit from the OLC to his judicial position. [inaudible] Congress is reviewing his candidacy, and he’s going through the committee process with the Senate Judiciary Committee, no one is aware, as far as I can see, certainly no one on the Senate Judiciary staff nor members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, are aware of this entire controversy or aware of these memos.
BRUCE ACKERMAN : So, there was no critical questioning at all at the hearing room, and that does not normally happen.
SEN . ORRIN HATCH : Mr. Bybee, I’ve seen a lot of people around here and a lot of judges, and I don&#8217;t know of anybody who has any more qualifications or any greater ability in the law than you have. And that’s counting some pretty exceptional people. And I think that’s one reason why this particular hearing has not been as much an ordeal as some of the ones others have had.
SCOTT HORTON : Had the Senate known about these memos, there’s simply no way Bybee ever would have been confirmed as a federal judge to begin with.
SEN . ORRIN HATCH : But I’m hopeful that in your case and the cases of many, many others that we can get you through, get you on the bench, and get you doing your life&#8217;s work, which is really what that will be, in the best interests of our country. And I have absolutely no doubt that your efforts will be in the best interests of our country.
SCOTT HORTON : Had all this been on the record, it’s very clear he wouldn’t have been confirmed. So that means he secured his confirmation to the bench through stealth.
BRUCE ACKERMAN : Judge Bybee is going to exercise an important position of power in the United States government for the next twenty-five years. The question is, shall we remove him from the future exercise of power? And to have someone who is a &mdash; violated the war crimes statute, let&#8217;s say &mdash; let’s say he did &mdash; if he did, then to interpret the laws of the United States and to tell other people they should go to jail, well, this is quite something.
SCOTT HORTON : There may be very good reasons why a prosecutor, in the end of the day, would decide not to indict Jay Bybee and take him to trial. I can imagine &mdash; you know, I can easily understand these considerations. But that someone like this would be sitting as a federal judge at the highest-level court below the Supreme Court, that’s outrageous. You know, I think also there&#8217;s an obvious solution to this dilemma, and that solution would be for Jay Bybee to resign.
AMY GOODMAN : That’s attorney Scott Horton. Before that, Yale University law professor Bruce Ackerman. Congratulating Jay Bybee in the Senate hearing was Orrin Hatch, the senator from Utah. Philippe Sands?
PHILIPPE SANDS : I think it’s a story that is picked up outside the United States, that a man who authorized &mdash; who authorized torture, who signed two memos, is sitting on one of the highest courts of the United States, sends a shocking signal around the world. I think it’s an affront to the idea that the United States is committed to the rule of law. The United States is going around the world telling people to clean up their judicial appointment systems, attacking often very justifiably the composition of international tribunals for not having the right sort of people as judges. And yet, on the Ninth Circuit, we have a man who signed off on waterboarding and said it was fine and could be used.
I think the sooner there is a proper inquiry as to the circumstances in which he obtained his position &mdash; and, of course, it’s important to remember that at the date he went through his hearings, the memos had not yet appeared, so the members of the Judiciary Committee were not aware of what he had done, and he did not offer it up. And that, of course, raises certain questions as to whether or not he misled the Judiciary Committee.
AMY GOODMAN : Another headline is the military tribunals, Jane Mayer, and President Obama&#8217;s reversal on the military tribunals. What will happen now?
JANE MAYER : Well, you know, they haven’t given us all the details yet of what these tribunals will involve. I mean, and so, you know, what President Obama has basically said is that he was &mdash; he would restore the rule of law and due process for all the detainees in the war on terror. And we will see whether or not military tribunals can live up to that.
AMY GOODMAN : And this latest headline, which is the Congress saying “not in my backyard” for &mdash; will not fund &mdash;-
JANE MAYER : The ultimate “not in my backyard.” They -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash; Guantanamo closing.
JANE MAYER : Nobody wants to have any of the Guantanamo prisoners anywhere in their state in this entire country, it seems, and the Democrats have really just fled from Obama on this. And &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : Well, led the charge against Obama. Harry Reid, for example.
JANE MAYER : Really. I mean, they’ve criticized the Bush administration for keeping Guantanamo open, and now they are running away from trying to close it. So, it’s not exactly a profile in courage.
I think, you know, to some extent you can understand that these prisoners have been so dehumanized in the way they’ve been described. I mean, we had one top military official from the Bush administration describe them as being able to chew through hydraulic cables to bring down planes. And, you know, they&#8217;ve been described as absolute monsters. And the truth is, though, that the United States prison system has many monsters in it. It has, you know, the worst -&mdash; some very scary convicted terrorists, including the shoe bomber, Richard Reid. It’s got the people that tried to blow up the World Trade Center the first time. And I don&#8217;t know &mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : The Unabomber.
JANE MAYER : The Unabomber. You know, they have Timothy McVeigh. I mean, there are many people in maximum-security prisons in the United States who are being safely housed in those maximum-security prisons.
AMY GOODMAN : Philippe Sands, last word.
PHILIPPE SANDS : There’s a couple of related points.
AMY GOODMAN : Very quickly.
PHILIPPE SANDS : I mean, military tribunals is a mistake. To turn this into a war, I think, sends the wrong message. But there&#8217;s a way finally to tie together all of these threads. The Obama administration is desperately trying to get rid of these people from Guantanamo and trying to do deals with third countries, including European countries, to take these individuals. Some of these countries, I think, are going to turn around to the Obama administration and say, “Look, we may be willing to do this, but you’ve got to get your own house in order. You’ve got to get to the bottom of what happened. You can’t expect us to do the cleanup for you, if you are not going to put the spotlight on the wrongdoing that happened in the past.” And I think connections will increasingly be made on those issues.
AMY GOODMAN : Philippe Sands and Jane Mayer, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Philippe Sands is author of Torture Team . Jane Mayer, The Dark Side . Both books are now out in paperback.AMYGOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour on one of the most controversial legacies of the Bush administration: the use and legal justification of torture. In the weeks since President Obama released the torture memos, a former FBI interrogator testified to the inefficacy of the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, a former aide to Colin Powell said the interrogations were aimed at building the case for the Iraq war, and a coalition of advocacy groups has just launched a campaign to disbar twelve former Bush administration lawyers.

Meanwhile, in Spain, despite the opposition of the Spanish attorney general, Judge Baltasar Garzon has launched probes into the torture at Guantanamo as well as six Bush administration lawyers who provided the legal framework for the use of torture.

Here in the United States, just how much change or accountability the Obama administration will bring remains to be seen. Last week, President Obama reneged on a promise to release photographs showing the abuse of prisoners at overseas CIA and military jails.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA: The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further enflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger. Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.

AMYGOODMAN: Later in the week, President Obama invited further criticism for deciding to resurrect military commissions for prisoners at Guantanamo. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs defended the military tribunal system.

ROBERTGIBBS: The President, as I said, during the debate said that properly structured military commissions had a role to play. The changes that he is seeking, he believes, will ensure the protections that are necessary for these to be conducted, in order to reach that certain justice as well as live up to our values.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I’m joined today in the firehouse studio by two people who have been closely following the Bush administration’s treatment of prisoners held overseas and helped expose many of its facets. Philippe Sands is a British attorney and professor at University College London, the author of the book Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. The book uncovered the role of US government lawyers in authorizing torture. It’s cited as a key influence by the Spanish lawyer prosecuting the case against the six Bush administration lawyers.

I’m also joined by New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer. She is the author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she recently won the Ridenhour Book Prize and the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! I wanted to start off on the issue of the Spanish parliament, actually just in the last hours, yesterday, saying — well, Philippe Sands, maybe you can explain it, because it’s been hard to understand where Spain stands on this issue and on their crusading judge, Baltasar Garzon.

PHILIPPESANDS: Well, Spain’s law has basically allowed its criminal courts to investigate international crimes such as torture and other international abuses for many years. That was the basis, of course, for the case brought against Senator Pinochet a decade or so ago.

The decision yesterday is merely a recommendation by the parliament to change the law and to limit its application to situations in which Spaniards are involved or the perpetrators are present on Spanish soil. It’s, as I understand it, only prospective; it only looks to the future, and so it has no effect on existing investigations.

But more to the point, in any event, the case brought against the Bush Six, the cases that Judges Velasco and Baltasar Garzon are looking at, do indeed involve individuals either of Spanish nationality or Spanish residency, so I don’t think this will have any effect for ongoing proceedings.

AMYGOODMAN: What about this pressure that’s being brought on the Spanish parliament and on everyone in Spain right now?

PHILIPPESANDS: I think it may actually not be the case which is being investigated in relation to the Bush Six and the Guantanamo abuses, but the Israeli investigation, which has been undergoing — underway for some considerable period of time, and that has caused tremendous pressure to be brought to bear on the Spanish government from the Israeli government. And I’m not sure, to be honest —-

AMYGOODMAN: And that investigation is...?

PHILIPPESANDS: That investigation concerns abuses in Gaza and other occupied territories. And I’m not sure -— what I’m not hearing is that there is any huge pressure from the Obama administration in relation to these issues. There have been high-level conversations and discussions. The criminal investigation is underway. The Spanish judges have sent what are called "letters rogatory" asking questions to the US Department of Justice. The Attorney General, Mr. Holder, has said he will treat those seriously and look at them properly.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, let’s look at the Spanish case here, the six people and who they are and where they come from in the Bush administration.

PHILIPPESANDS: Well, the Bush Six, amazingly and coincidentally, are the same six lawyers I happen to have focused on. And in that sense, I think the book contributed to a catalyzing effect.

The lawyers that you’ve got, in no particular order of significance: Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney General and White House counsel; David Addington, who was Vice President Cheney’s counsel; Jay Bybee, who’s been very much in the news recently in relation to the second of his memos which has come out; John Yoo, who probably wrote large parts of that memo, still teaching at Berkeley Law School; Doug Feith, who was the number three in the Pentagon; and finally, Jim Haynes, who was Mr. Rumsfeld’s lawyer as general counsel.

I don’t think any of those individuals are going to be taking vacations in Tuscany in the foreseeable future.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go to Feith. You interviewed Feith, actually; is that right?

PHILIPPESANDS: I did. And you can —-

AMYGOODMAN: Explain.

PHILIPPESANDS: Well, I interviewed him in December 2006. I recorded the interview. I’ve produced a transcript of the interview. I’ve put it on the website of Vanity Fair magazine, so it’s available for all to see. People can form their own view.

He, during the course of that interview, confirmed the significance of the decision on the Geneva Conventions, that none of the detainees at Guantanamo could have rights under it, as a basis for moving forward, if you like, on harsher techniques.

And he, amazingly, when I first met him, denied that he’d had any role in the interrogation issues. I pointed out to him, when I was with him, that his name appeared on the actual memorandum signed by Donald Rumsfeld authorizing new techniques of interrogation. He changed his tune. But we’ve seen, more recently, other documents emerge, the Senate Armed Services Committee emerge, placing him really at the center of the whole operation.

AMYGOODMAN: Former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, one of these six lawyers named in the Spanish complaint, denies, as you said, directing the Bush administration’s torture policy. Well, an interview on The O’Reilly Factor on Fox earlier this year, Feith also criticized your work, Philippe Sands.

DOUGLASFEITH: First of all, what I understand about the allegations about me, personally, I happen to know are just backwards, and they -— I’m being criticized for a position that I never advocated. And so, the facts are just wrong.

But there’s also a broader point of principle here, which is, what the Spanish authorities are considering doing is indicting people in the — former US government officials for giving advice to the President. And the idea that a foreign official can disagree with advice given to the President — they’re not talking about action, and they’re not even talking about directing people to take action. They’re talking about people who were advising the President.

What’s going on in Spain is implementing, essentially, an idea that a British lawyer has been proposing, a guy named Philippe Sands, who wrote an extremely dishonest book on the subject. So I knew that he was going around, and some other people were going around, trying to find somebody in Europe who could bring indictments.

AMYGOODMAN: That’s Douglas Feith. Philippe Sands?

PHILIPPESANDS: He is — and he’s every author’s best publicist, because being on the O’Reilly show in that way, of course, is wonderful for an unknown British lawyer.

I have, as you know, recently published the paperback edition of the book. I’ve not changed a single word in relation to what I wrote about Mr. Feith. I stand by every word.

He has obvious concerns. He needs to set the record straight, in his view, to avoid investigations that are underway. He’s also subject to a disbarment application, I think, that’s been initiated this week. I think he faces very considerable difficulty. And I’m perfectly content to debate him at any time or any place, and I’m perfectly happy for him to make those allegations. They’re really without any foundation at all.

AMYGOODMAN: And, Jane Mayer, the other members of the Bush Six, this grouping that have been —- that the Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, is going after, where are they? What’s happening with them?

JANEMAYER: Well, various things. David Addington has actually not been heard from for quite some time. So -—

AMYGOODMAN: And his position was...?

JANEMAYER: His position was the lawyer to Vice President Cheney and then the Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney. And he was a very forceful character who really helped shape the — what they called the new paradigm, this whole legal understanding that put certain terror suspects outside the rule of law. He was very important in shaping that.

You know, some of the others, as mentioned, John Yoo is teaching at Boalt Hall in Berkeley. He’s got a full course schedule for the fall, so I think he’s coming back. And I think Alberto Gonzales is still looking for a job, from what I’ve heard.

I mean, these — they are — a cloud hangs over this group. And it obviously doesn’t help their reputations to have been named in this case in Spain. They are in the midst of a sort of a growing political furor over their role. And I think that it will be clarified somewhat — that is, their role — when the Justice Department has a study that’s coming out very soon. It’s an investigation into whether the lawyers could be faulted for justifying America’s embrace of torture. They basically made it possible, by coming up with decisions that said that these kinds of techniques could be legal. And the Justice Department has been spending five years looking at their role and is due to release a report possibly at the end of this month.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to go to break and then come back.

I know Vice President Dick Cheney, though he hadn’t been seen a great deal in the eight years he was in office, is now being seen a great deal and saying — raising this very issue. I mean, “What if you had Eisenhower,” I think he said, “going after Truman and charging him with war crimes for dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?”

We’re talking to Jane Mayer. Her book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, has just come out in paperback, as has Philippe Sands’ Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. We’ll be back with them in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: Our guests for the hour are Jane Mayer — The Dark Side

is her book, The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals. She writes for The New Yorker magazine. And Philippe Sands is a British barrister, a British attorney. His book is called Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, a lot of stories in the news around this right now.

But my question to you, Philippe Sands, is — so, you’re talking about, and, Jane, you’re talking about, these six people being afraid to travel abroad probably. But what about here at home? Why can they travel freely here?

PHILIPPESANDS: Well, I think that there’s a big issue here. I mean, I’ve always thought that foreign investigations are not an end in themselves; they’re a means to an end, and it really must be for the United States to sort this out. I’ve testified on several occasions before House Judiciary and Senate Judiciary, and I’ve said on every occasion my deepest wish is for the United States to sort this out. That is only, I think, at an early stage of beginning to happen.

President Obama seems very torn. Does he want to be a rule-of-law guy? Does he want to be a move-on, realpolitik sort of guy? And he cuts and turns in different directions. I think he may be playing the long game. I think it is inevitable; there will have to be some sort of investigation in the United States.

The big question becomes, what sort of investigation? Jane has mentioned the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Department of Justice, which will produce, I think, a report very shortly, which will be very significant.

AMYGOODMAN: And who’s leading this report, Jane?

JANEMAYER: Who is leading it?

AMYGOODMAN: Yeah, who is doing this investigation? Who’s heading it up?

JANEMAYER: Well, it was done by non-political experts, who are basically the watchdogs of the lawyers inside the Justice Department. And it will be released by Eric Holder, the Attorney General.

AMYGOODMAN: And the issue of the Bush Six, they’re from a certain sector of the Bush administration. There’s no one in the military. There’s no one in the CIA. Why not? And also, it doesn’t go up the chain of command.

PHILIPPESANDS: I think that that’s a very important question. I focused on the lawyers, because I am a lawyer, and I really, as I think I’ve said to you before when I’ve talked with you, couldn’t understand how lawyers, who had been to the finest law schools in the United States, could approve torture, which is what they did. And so, I focused on them for that reason.

But I focused on them also for another tactical reason. I never imagined that so soon there would be so much scrutiny in the United States. It didn’t really occur to me that it would be possible to really put these issues under the spotlight. And if it did happen, I didn’t think it could happen in relation to a former vice president or a former secretary of defense or a former president. So I focused on the next tier down. The key point is, they were enablers. But for the lawyers, none of this would have happened.

But at the end of the day, the key people are those who actually signed off on the decisions, right at the very highest echelons of government. And we now know that’s not just the Vice President, it’s not just the President, it’s not just Rumsfeld. There’s new material that has come out to indicate that Condoleezza Rice may have had a role in all of this. She has said, of course, she didn’t take the decision; she merely communicated the decision. I’m not sure that there’s much of a distinction to be drawn there. But it goes very high.

AMYGOODMAN: What is the evidence there?

PHILIPPESANDS: Well, the evidence is one of the new documents that has emerged, which has had very little play here. It’s a chronology that is produced by the Intelligence Committee of the Senate in January of this year, detailing the circumstances in which the two torture memos, written by John Yoo, signed by Jay Bybee, were produced on the 1st of August, 2002. And that document was put out recently by Eric Holder, the Attorney General, who I think is very committed to getting to the root of what went wrong and what happened. And that document identifies two meetings that held in — were held in July 2002 and identifies by office, but not by name, the individuals who basically, it says, approved waterboarding at those meetings. And it included in the list of names Condoleezza Rice. That is pretty powerful evidence.

AMYGOODMAN: Jane Mayer, want to add to that?

JANEMAYER: Well, no. I mean, we’ve seen that she’s been struggling recently to answer questions in Stanford University and then a fourth grader put some questions to her at one point. And she’s having a very hard time explaining herself.

This is, you know, I mean — anyway, I think that, to me, what’s interesting is this is not going away. There seems to be a hope within the Obama administration that they could somehow move on, put this behind them. And what we’re seeing is it’s not really containable politically. They’re going to have to deal with it somehow.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go to former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has been on the airwaves quite a bit in the past few weeks right now. This is a SOT, a clip, of Vice President Cheney. He has been defending the Bush administration’s torture of prisoners held overseas. He was appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation last week, fiercely defending the techniques he authorized, but denied they amounted to torture. He also called for the CIA to release full records of prisoner interrogations to prove Bush administration torture tactics yielded valuable intelligence. He was questioned by CBS’s Bob Schieffer.

BOBSCHIEFFER: Other people in the administration say, as a matter of fact, what we found out using these methods — and I mean, let’s call things what they are — waterboarding was one of the techniques that were used — that they really didn’t get all that much from that. You say they did.

DICKCHENEY: I say they did. Four former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency say they did, bipartisan basis. Release the memos. And we can look and see for yourself what was produced.

BOBSCHIEFFER: Well, Mr. Vice President, let me ask you this. I mean, I’m not asking you to violate any rules of classification, but is there anything you can tell us specifically that those memos would tell us? I mean, some information we gleaned, some fact that we got that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise?

DICKCHENEY: What it shows is that, overwhelmingly, the process we had in place produced from certain key individuals, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, two of the three who were waterboarded — and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the man who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, blew up the World Trade Center, attacked the Pentagon, tried to blow up the White House or the Capitol building, an evil, evil man that’s been in our custody since March of ’03. He did not cooperate fully, in terms of interrogations, until after waterboarding. Once we went through that process, he produced vast quantities of invaluable information about al-Qaeda.

BOBSCHIEFFER: What do you say to those, Mr. Vice President, who say that when we employ these kind of tactics, which are, after all, the tactics that the other side uses, that when we adopt their methods, that we’re weakening security, not enhancing security, because it sort of makes a mockery of what we tell the rest of the world?

DICKCHENEY: Well, then you’d have to say that, in effect, we’re prepared to sacrifice American lives rather than run an intelligent interrogation program that would provide us the information we need to protect America.

The fact of the matter is, these techniques that we’re talking about are used on our own people. We — in a SERE program that, in effect, trains our people with respect to capture and evasion, and so forth, and escape. A lot of them go through these same — same exact procedures.

BOBSCHIEFFER: Do you —-

DICKCHENEY: Now -—

BOBSCHIEFFER: Is what you’re saying here is that we should do anything if we could get information?

DICKCHENEY: No. Remember what happened here, Bob. We had captured these people. We had pursued interrogation in a more normal way. We decided that we needed some enhanced techniques. So we went to the Justice Department. And the controversy has arisen over the opinions written by the Justice Department.

The reason we went to the Justice Department wasn’t because we felt we were going to take some kind of free-hand assault on these people or that we were in the torture business. We weren’t. And specifically, what we got from the Office of Legal Counsel were legal memos that laid out what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate, in light of our international commitments. If we had been about torture, we wouldn’t have wasted our time going to the Justice Department.

PHILIPPESANDS: The man — let’s face it, let’s call a spade a spade — is a torturer. And he should face what torturers should face: namely, a full criminal investigation. Waterboarding is torture. There are no ifs and buts.

I see that clip, and I see him rewriting history. What I show conclusively in the book, what we now know, is that the legal memos followed the fixation of a policy. In other words, the law followed the policy. The policy was to move to abuse. They found the small group of lawyers who could be relied upon to sign off on the dotted line. And that is what happened. That is now clearly established. And that is why the lawyers are in the dark.

And I find it astonishing and deeply sad that a former vice president of this country can still take to the airwaves and make those sorts of arguments, arguments that plays into the hands of foreign nations. I mean, if they’ve got memos saying these things can be done by the United States against others, then why can’t others use the same memos to do the same thing against US citizens? It’s absolutely shocking, and it is astonishing that the airwaves continue to give him the type of space to make these types of statements.

JANEMAYER: It’s also — I mean, one thing that’s interesting —-

AMYGOODMAN: Jane Mayer.

JANEMAYER: —- to me is it’s a false premise, if you actually know the details of these cases. And no matter how much data has come out, it seems that Vice President Cheney is impervious to the facts, which are, as we heard, when there were hearings in Congress the week before last, Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who was at the side of Abu Zubaydah and trying to interrogate him, said they were getting good information out of him simply by talking to him, simply by being knowledgeable about the culture that they were questioning him about. And that work —-

ALISOUFAN: From my experience, I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as enhanced interrogation techniques, a position shared by professional operatives, including CIA officers who were present at the initial phases of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation. These techniques, from an operational perspective, are slow, ineffective, unreliable and harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaeda.

A major problem is it — it is ineffective. Al-Qaeda are trained to resist torture. As we see from the recently released DOJ memos on interrogation, the contractors had to keep requesting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods.

In the case of Abu Zubaydah, that continued for several months, right ’til waterboarding was introduced. And waterboarding itself had to be used eighty-three times, an indication that Abu Zubaydah had already called his interrogators’ bluff. In contrast, when we interrogated him using intelligent interrogation methods, within the first hour we gained important actionable intelligence.

This amateurish technique is harmful to our long-term strategy and interests. It plays into the enemy’s handbook.

JANEMAYER: I mean, and so, what you have here is an eyewitness who’s contradicting the Vice President of the United States. The Vice President was not there. The eyewitness who was said we didn’t need to use these torture techniques.

And what’s interesting is, it wasn’t just the FBI agent Ali Soufan; there is a report that, in the New York Times, that the CIA officers who were there also opposed ramping up these techniques, and they wanted to stop. They wanted to stop using techniques that they thought were inhumane on Abu Zubaydah, and they were ordered to keep going by the political people back in Washington.

So, you’ve got people who are not at the scene who are making these decisions and counter-commanding the people who were at the scene, who really know something about what was going on.

AMYGOODMAN: And explain the sequence, from the FBI interrogating Zubaydah to the CIA doing it, why that happened.

JANEMAYER: Well, the FBI — Ali Soufan is one of the most knowledgeable counterterrorism officers in America. He’s fluent in Arabic, and he’s been trying to fight al-Qaeda for years. And he was brought in to try to get some information out of Abu Zubaydah in legal ways. But the CIA was ordered to take Zubaydah and do things to him that Ali Soufan, at the scene, said he thought were criminal. We now know that he also — and I described this in the book — he sent up word through the chain of command to the top of the FBI, saying, “I think that the CIA officers should be arrested at the scene,” because of what they were doing.

AMYGOODMAN: Who was the CIA officer?

JANEMAYER: Well, we haven’t got the names here, but we know who was at the top of the agency. And it wouldn’t have happened without the blessing of George Tenet, who was at the time the director. And so, at any rate, those techniques moved forward. And as we now know, as Ali Soufan says, they had to do this eighty-three times to Abu Zubaydah before they were satisfied.

AMYGOODMAN: The role of medical professionals. I was just on this many city tour, and I was in Spokane. We weren’t far from the American Legion building, where Mitchell Jessen is located, about a 120-person firm. Explain Mitchell Jessen, where it fits into this story, right to the latest torture memos that actually President Obama had posted online.

JANEMAYER: Yeah, and also what —- we just heard Vice President Cheney say, “Oh, well, we didn’t do anything to these people that we don’t do to our own people in training.” And he mentioned the SERE program, which is the training program where they take US soldiers who might possibly be taken captive by an immoral, unethical enemy that doesn’t abide by any law, and they subject them to a little taste of what torture might be like.

That program, the SERE program, has psychologists who work in it and oversee the training in order to make sure that the soldiers don’t freak out completely.

AMYGOODMAN: Survival, Evasion, Resistance...

JANEMAYER: Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape is what the program is called, SERE.

And two of those military psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, got involved very early on in designing what became the United States’ interrogation program. What they did was they reverse-engineered. They took tactics that were designed by the Chinese communists, by the Stalinist show trials, by various tyrannical states, to get false confessions out of people. They took those techniques, and, amazingly, they became the template for what the United States started doing to people who were in our custody. So -—

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go now to the issue of Nancy Pelosi. Some unusual things have happened as a result of, well, the Republicans saying that she knew, that she was briefed. In fact, I think Newt Gingrich has just written a letter saying she should step down as the Speaker of the House. He was once the Speaker of the House and was forced to step down. But it’s going to an interesting issue, which is, the Republicans, of course, against a commission, an investigation, now they’re calling for it. The question is whether it will backfire.

But let’s go to this question of who knew about the use of torture and when they knew it, a central question now, Republicans pointing to the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s involvement in the torture briefings, and not just the Republicans saying this. After the CIA released documents last week showing Pelosi was briefed on waterboarding back in September 2002, she insisted she was told waterboarding wasn’t being used then and said secrecy rules forced her to remain silent when she learned more later.

REP. NANCYPELOSI: The CIA briefed me only once on enhanced interrogation techniques in September 2002 in my capacity as ranking member of the Intelligence Committee. I was informed then that the Department of Justice opinions had concluded that the use of enhanced interrogation techniques were legal. The only mention of waterboarding at that briefing was that it was not being employed.

AMYGOODMAN: Nancy Pelosi. Jane Mayer?

JANEMAYER: Well, you know, it’s interesting that it may result in pushing ahead the investigations. You know, the Republicans may have sort of stepped in it in a way. So, she’s been calling for an independent investigation, as well. So whatever implication there is of her in this process, it hasn’t stopped her from calling for an investigation.

AMYGOODMAN: And your sense of what she knew and when she knew it?

JANEMAYER: You know, I don’t think any of us really knows exactly, but I do think it is completely possible that there were honest misunderstandings that took place in those briefings, because what the CIA said to many people — and I don’t know specifically what they said to Pelosi, but what they said again was, “We are only doing to these detainees what we do to our own people in training.” So it made it sound like it was relatively innocent to many people who did not understand the second part of this, which was what we do to our own people in training is we torture them. And so, it is — I think many people who got these briefings had the failure of imagination to understand what was going on, or else they didn’t really follow up and want to know. And I don’t know what happened with her.

JANEMAYER: I was talking to Bob Graham. Bob Graham absolutely denies that he was told that Abu Zubaydah was going to be waterboarded. And he also says that the CIA’s dates are wrong in describing when he was in these briefings. And he keeps, you know, quite famously, a diary of everything he ever does. So I went back and checked. You know, and there’s sort of an interesting statement from the current CIA director about these briefings, where he basically said, “You know, this was seven years ago, and we’re relying on people’s memories, and memories may be fallible, basically.” There’s kind of a little wiggle room on all sides in this.

AMYGOODMAN: Are you surprised that the current CIA director is coming down so forcefully on this issue in defending the CIA? It’s not as if he comes out of the CIA establishment.

JANEMAYER: You know, I think he has felt that it’s important to win the loyalty of the people inside the building. You know, that’s what people tell me. And he’s met a lot of them by now. And I guess that’s —- you know, he seems to be taking that role.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to break, and we’re going to come back. We’re talking about Leon Panetta, who is also fellow California -—

JANEMAYER: That is true, very uncomfortably.

AMYGOODMAN: — with Nancy Pelosi.

JANEMAYER: And I think an old friend of Nancy Pelosi’s.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, Jane Mayer and Philippe Sands are our guests for the hour. We’re talking about the issue of torture. We’re also going to talk about the military commissions, whether they will go on, and the Congress saying no to funding the closing of Guantanamo, and what this means overall for President Obama’s agenda and his reversal on the issue of pictures.

Philippe Sands’ book is called Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. Jane Mayer’s is The Dark Side. They’re both now out in paperback, have done groundbreaking work on torture and exposing it in this country and around the world.

Stay with us.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: We’re spending the hour with two people who have been exposing the issue of torture in this country for years now, writing breaking pieces, both writing books. Jane Mayer’s book is called The Dark Side . She was a National Book Award finalist. She just won the Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. Philippe Sands is a British barrister, a British lawyer, who wrote the Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values.

The issue of the pictures — Jane, I want to ask you about this. You had President Obama clearly talking about the importance of transparency and photographs, and now they’ve gone back. President Obama has done just a complete reversal on this and said, no, they’re not going to release them. I couldn’t help but notice it was after Vice President Cheney’s going on — I don’t know about every network, but on a number of networks and speaking out, speaking out, that his campaign may actually be quite successful.

JANEMAYER: I just don’t know if it was really Cheney that pushed them back. It seems to me that what pushed them back was kind of the military establishment. It was General Odierno, in particular, who was the commander in Iraq at the time that these pictures and this abuse took place. So, I mean, there was kind of a self-interested aspect to the advice not to release these pictures from General Odierno, which I don’t think people have examined that much.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain.

JANEMAYER: But — well, I mean, these pictures were of abuse that took place on his watch. And if you go up the chain of command, inevitably you would get to the general who’s saying, “Don’t release the pictures.”

So, you know, I think that — you know, that it seems that Obama is trying to sort of split the baby in half and keep some kind of — keep the military establishment on his side, the intelligence establishment on his side. He’s arguing that these would inflame anti-Americanism and might endanger soldiers out in the field.

AMYGOODMAN: And General McChrystal, now replacing McKiernan in Afghanistan, known for being in charge of, well, in Iraq at a time when the prisoners were being abused there at Abu Ghraib?

JANEMAYER: Yeah, I mean, he has a — you know, it depends who you talk to — a mixed reputation. Some people think he’s fantastic. I think what happened was, he changed his view on some of these things. And so, after Abu Ghraib, everybody sort of pulled back from using really abusive tactics in Iraq, as they had used before the pictures of Abu Ghraib came out. And McChrystal, though, was overseeing Special Forces. And a lot of very bad things happened in the hands of the Special Forces in Iraq in around 2003, during the insurgency. People were just rounded up and subjected to awful abuse. And it’s been described; I describe it in my book. It upset some very good officers who tried to stop it. And so, you know, there’s a lot to hide.

And I think the problem for Obama here is, by not opening up the worst stuff from the Bush years, he may be in danger of becoming part of a cover-up. And he really — I don’t think he really wants to be in that position politically. At the same time, I understand — I’ve talked to people in the White House. They do not want to be distracted by this forever. They’ve got a very positive agenda that they want to push forward. They see this as Bush’s problems. They don’t want to be tied up in it forever.

AMYGOODMAN: Or they’re tying themselves in it forever.

JANEMAYER: You know, they really don’t want — they have inherited this mess. So I have a certain amount of sympathy for them, in that they want this to go away.

AMYGOODMAN: Philippe Sands, do you have the same sympathy?

PHILIPPESANDS: It’s not going to go away. I mean, history tells you, in Chile, in Argentina, in other parts of the world —-

AMYGOODMAN: You worked on the Augusto Pinochet case.

PHILIPPESANDS: —- these cases do not go away. That’s what history teaches you. You can’t bury your head in the sand and hope that you will draw a line and no one will talk about it anymore. It will go on and on.

And my fear with these photographs is that they are taking steps which will inevitably delay the day of reckoning. It’s the same thing in relation to investigations. What’s significant about these photographs —- and I think this has not been fully appreciated -—

AMYGOODMAN: And we’re talking about — they’re talking about something like forty of them, but we’re talking actually thousands, is that right?

PHILIPPESANDS: Right, there are thousands.

JANEMAYER: There are thousands.

PHILIPPESANDS: There are thousands of photographs. They are talking about releasing forty-four. And the significance of them is that they are not limited to Iraq. They include Afghanistan and Bagram, and they include Guantanamo.

And the release of the photographs is significant, because it will give full force to the lie that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were a few bad eggs. What will become impossible to withstand is the recognition that the abuse was the result of policy decisions and legal advices and was widespread.

We know some of the images that have been the subject of this litigation. It’s not right for President Obama to say these are not particularly inflammatory images. We know some of the stuff that is going to be coming.

AMYGOODMAN: And they are?

PHILIPPESANDS: And it includes photographs, I’m told, of people’s heads being partly shaved, so that a cross is placed on the head of a Muslim man. That is one image that I understand is out there. They’re going to come out at some point. They ought to be gotten out sooner rather than later, and at that point people can then begin the process of moving on.

And coming back, I think, to the earlier point, it’s the same in relation to the issue of investigations. It’s not a party political issue. I completely subscribe to the view that Jane has just explained in relation to what Nancy Pelosi has said, but we shouldn’t be partisan about this. If there was knowledge, it doesn’t matter whether it was Independents or Republicans or Democrats. We need a full investigation. It needs to come out.

AMYGOODMAN: I want to go to the role of a judge — now judge; he was then just Jay Bybee — who signed off on two of the torture memos released last month by President Obama. He signed the memos when he was Assistant Attorney General at the Office of Legal Counsel. Six months later, he breezed through his confirmation hearing for his appointment to the federal appeals court, and Congress voted him to a lifetime on the bench.

This is excerpts of a piece by David Murdock for the American News Project that looks into this very question, using interviews with attorney Scott Horton and Yale University law professor Bruce Ackerman.

BRUCEACKERMAN: Without his authorization, the members of the CIA may well not have done it at all. Or, if they had, they would be plainly subject to criminal responsibility today. So these memos are at the absolute center of the torture activities of the United States government. This is not a minor matter. This is the foundation of our activities. Without these memos, the entire exercise of torture probably would not have taken place.

SCOTTHORTON: Well, if we go back and check this against the timeline, we see these memoranda, you know, issued at the beginning of August, prepared, you know, perhaps a few weeks before that. This stacks up with the time when Jay Bybee is in transit from the OLC to his judicial position. [inaudible] Congress is reviewing his candidacy, and he’s going through the committee process with the Senate Judiciary Committee, no one is aware, as far as I can see, certainly no one on the Senate Judiciary staff nor members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, are aware of this entire controversy or aware of these memos.

BRUCEACKERMAN: So, there was no critical questioning at all at the hearing room, and that does not normally happen.

SEN. ORRINHATCH: Mr. Bybee, I’ve seen a lot of people around here and a lot of judges, and I don’t know of anybody who has any more qualifications or any greater ability in the law than you have. And that’s counting some pretty exceptional people. And I think that’s one reason why this particular hearing has not been as much an ordeal as some of the ones others have had.

SCOTTHORTON: Had the Senate known about these memos, there’s simply no way Bybee ever would have been confirmed as a federal judge to begin with.

SEN. ORRINHATCH: But I’m hopeful that in your case and the cases of many, many others that we can get you through, get you on the bench, and get you doing your life’s work, which is really what that will be, in the best interests of our country. And I have absolutely no doubt that your efforts will be in the best interests of our country.

SCOTTHORTON: Had all this been on the record, it’s very clear he wouldn’t have been confirmed. So that means he secured his confirmation to the bench through stealth.

BRUCEACKERMAN: Judge Bybee is going to exercise an important position of power in the United States government for the next twenty-five years. The question is, shall we remove him from the future exercise of power? And to have someone who is a — violated the war crimes statute, let’s say — let’s say he did — if he did, then to interpret the laws of the United States and to tell other people they should go to jail, well, this is quite something.

SCOTTHORTON: There may be very good reasons why a prosecutor, in the end of the day, would decide not to indict Jay Bybee and take him to trial. I can imagine — you know, I can easily understand these considerations. But that someone like this would be sitting as a federal judge at the highest-level court below the Supreme Court, that’s outrageous. You know, I think also there’s an obvious solution to this dilemma, and that solution would be for Jay Bybee to resign.

PHILIPPESANDS: I think it’s a story that is picked up outside the United States, that a man who authorized — who authorized torture, who signed two memos, is sitting on one of the highest courts of the United States, sends a shocking signal around the world. I think it’s an affront to the idea that the United States is committed to the rule of law. The United States is going around the world telling people to clean up their judicial appointment systems, attacking often very justifiably the composition of international tribunals for not having the right sort of people as judges. And yet, on the Ninth Circuit, we have a man who signed off on waterboarding and said it was fine and could be used.

I think the sooner there is a proper inquiry as to the circumstances in which he obtained his position — and, of course, it’s important to remember that at the date he went through his hearings, the memos had not yet appeared, so the members of the Judiciary Committee were not aware of what he had done, and he did not offer it up. And that, of course, raises certain questions as to whether or not he misled the Judiciary Committee.

AMYGOODMAN: Another headline is the military tribunals, Jane Mayer, and President Obama’s reversal on the military tribunals. What will happen now?

JANEMAYER: Well, you know, they haven’t given us all the details yet of what these tribunals will involve. I mean, and so, you know, what President Obama has basically said is that he was — he would restore the rule of law and due process for all the detainees in the war on terror. And we will see whether or not military tribunals can live up to that.

AMYGOODMAN: And this latest headline, which is the Congress saying “not in my backyard” for — will not fund —-

JANEMAYER: The ultimate “not in my backyard.” They -—

AMYGOODMAN: — Guantanamo closing.

JANEMAYER: Nobody wants to have any of the Guantanamo prisoners anywhere in their state in this entire country, it seems, and the Democrats have really just fled from Obama on this. And —-

AMYGOODMAN: Well, led the charge against Obama. Harry Reid, for example.

JANEMAYER: Really. I mean, they’ve criticized the Bush administration for keeping Guantanamo open, and now they are running away from trying to close it. So, it’s not exactly a profile in courage.

I think, you know, to some extent you can understand that these prisoners have been so dehumanized in the way they’ve been described. I mean, we had one top military official from the Bush administration describe them as being able to chew through hydraulic cables to bring down planes. And, you know, they’ve been described as absolute monsters. And the truth is, though, that the United States prison system has many monsters in it. It has, you know, the worst -— some very scary convicted terrorists, including the shoe bomber, Richard Reid. It’s got the people that tried to blow up the World Trade Center the first time. And I don’t know —

AMYGOODMAN: The Unabomber.

JANEMAYER: The Unabomber. You know, they have Timothy McVeigh. I mean, there are many people in maximum-security prisons in the United States who are being safely housed in those maximum-security prisons.

AMYGOODMAN: Philippe Sands, last word.

PHILIPPESANDS: There’s a couple of related points.

AMYGOODMAN: Very quickly.

PHILIPPESANDS: I mean, military tribunals is a mistake. To turn this into a war, I think, sends the wrong message. But there’s a way finally to tie together all of these threads. The Obama administration is desperately trying to get rid of these people from Guantanamo and trying to do deals with third countries, including European countries, to take these individuals. Some of these countries, I think, are going to turn around to the Obama administration and say, “Look, we may be willing to do this, but you’ve got to get your own house in order. You’ve got to get to the bottom of what happened. You can’t expect us to do the cleanup for you, if you are not going to put the spotlight on the wrongdoing that happened in the past.” And I think connections will increasingly be made on those issues.

AMYGOODMAN: Philippe Sands and Jane Mayer, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Philippe Sands is author of Torture Team. Jane Mayer, The Dark Side. Both books are now out in paperback.]]>

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400Five Years After Helping to Expose Abu Ghraib Scandal, Christian Peacemaker Teams Continue Human Rights Workhttp://www.democracynow.org/2009/4/10/five_years_after_helping_to_expose
tag:democracynow.org,2009-04-10:en/story/6163cc AMY GOODMAN : Five years ago this month, in April of 2004, the first photographs from inside Abu Ghraib appeared in the US media. The photos showed Iraqi prisoners being tortured, abused and humiliated by US forces and private contractors.
While the first photos were broadcast on 60 Minutes and published in the pages of The New Yorker , the initial reports of torture actually came months earlier. Beginning in 2003, members of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq began documenting dozens of cases of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners inside US military facilities.
We’re joined right now, here at Ohio University in Athens, by two local peace activists, longtime members of the Christian Peacemaker Team, Peggy and Art Gish. Peggy Gish has worked in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams since October of 2002. She helped document the first reports of abuse inside US prisons in Iraq. She’s author of Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace . Her husband, Art Gish, has been part of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in the West Bank since 1995. He’s the author of several books, including Hebron Journal: Stories of Nonviolent Peacemaking .
Thank you so much for being with us. It’s wonderful to have you with us. Peggy Gish, let’s being with you. President Obama just took a surprise trip to Iraq. You, yourself, were kidnapped there in Iraq.
PEGGY GISH : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Just talk to me.
PEGGY GISH : I’m sorry, I’m not hearing you right.
AMY GOODMAN : Oh, just listen to what I’m saying, just as I’m talking to you here. What happened to you in Iraq?
PEGGY GISH : What happened in Iraq?
AMY GOODMAN : Yes.
ART GISH : What happened to you in Iraq?
PEGGY GISH : In Iraq, yes. Well, two of us were traveling to a very impoverished area in northwestern Iraq, and there were groups of people who wanted to work nonviolently to deal with the struggles there. And two of us were abducted on the way home. I was kept only two days, and my &mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : Where?
PEGGY GISH : In the compound out in a desert. And my colleague was kept for another six days. Then we were released unharmed, which we think has something to do with them hearing about the work of CPT and the kind of work that we were doing.
AMY GOODMAN : Of the Christian Peacemaker Teams.
PEGGY GISH : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, talk about that, and your work being seminal in getting out the photographs of Abu Ghraib.
PEGGY GISH : Yes. We started this work in the summer of 2003, and what &mdash; it grew out of just helping the Iraqi families that had people detained among their family. And then we began discovering gross abuse in all of the prisons of Iraq, not just Abu Ghraib. And there was a lot of brutality from the very beginning of the house raid in the middle of the night, where soldiers acknowledged that they had thirty seconds or forty seconds of absolute terror to subdue the people, and then brutality in the questioning, the interrogation process, torture going on in that process, as well as in the imprisonment time. So we were hearing stories from men and women who had been in Abu Ghraib and other prisons, and we compiled a report on seventy-two prisoners that became part of a pool of evidence, and we were one of several organizations, Iraqi and international groups, that put tremendous pressure on the system to make it public.
AMY GOODMAN : Why have you chosen to live in Iraq for so many years under the gun, I mean, in the midst of the US attack, why you’ve chosen to live in Iraq?
PEGGY GISH : Yes, why do I go back? I go there because I’ve been given a deep love for the Iraqi people, and love is really what has overcome the fear that I have to struggle with when I go there, but also because I am from a country that has done tremendous damage to their society, to the people, devastated the lives and culture of a people, and I want to do some small part in trying to help the people of Iraq, but also to let the people here know what is really happening there. So part of our work is just truth telling, witnessing what the occupation has done, what that has meant for people.
And it has been a horrible thing for the people of Iraq. It has meant up to a million people killed, a continued physical devastation of the country. There’s still very little clean water or electricity, very poor medical care. People have been traumatized. Friends tell us that they are so despairing and depressed and do not see much hope for the future of their country, at least not for generations. And so, it is a devastated country. And people say, “I don&#8217;t feel like it’s getting better.”
AMY GOODMAN : When were you last there?
PEGGY GISH : Two weeks ago. I just came back.
AMY GOODMAN : What was your reaction to President Obama&#8217;s recent surprise trip this week and his calling for troop reductions in Iraq?
PEGGY GISH : Yeah, I didn’t catch all that question.
ART GISH : What was your reaction to Obama going to Iraq this week?
PEGGY GISH : Yeah, I wish that Obama would be speaking out clearly, acknowledging the harm that the US has done there more clearly. And what we see and what Iraqis see is that Obama is just following in the same policies concerning Iraq that Bush has. The timetable for withdrawing is very similar to what Bush had put on the table. And they &mdash; I guess I’m afraid that he’s just being sucked into it, being pressured into a kind of aggressive military policy for dealing with the struggles of the world.
What’s happening with Iraq is now being transferred over into the work with Afghanistan, so we&#8217;re going to take troops from Iraq, but we&#8217;re going to increase the war there, the war on terror. And that is what we ought to be addressing, is our whole foreign policy, the way we are dealing with this whole problem of terrorism in the world.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re talking to Peggy Gish. Her husband Art Gish, also a Christian Peacemaker. Art, you spend your time in the West Bank, in the Occupied Territories.
ART GISH : Yes. Since 1995, I’ve been going to the West Bank every winter for three months. And I just came back from spending another three months there.
AMY GOODMAN : Why? Why have you chosen to go there? And explain how the Christian Peacemaker Teams developed.
ART GISH : Christian Peacemaker Teams came out of the peace churches, the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren, out of the idea that if we’re really serious about peace, we ought to be willing to take the same risks as soldiers take and go into a nonviolent &mdash; into violent situations and be a nonviolent presence there. What if people who want peace made the same kind of commitment that soldiers make?
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean?
ART GISH : That we go there, and we take risks, and we stand in the middle, and we work for peace in there.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain what you’ve done in West Bank.
ART GISH : OK. The most important thing we do is listen. And we listen to all sides. We act as international observers. I like to say we have the grandmother effect. There are things nobody would do if their grandmother is watching. So, in any conflict anywhere in the world, it’s really important to have outside observers there who are a presence there, and the people know they&#8217;re being watched, and that will reduce the violence.
And then, third, we also engage in nonviolent direct action. If the Israeli military wants to demolish a Palestinian house, we’ll sit on the roof of the house. We stand in front of tanks and bulldozers, and our slogan is &quot;getting in the way.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : We just passed the anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie on March 16th.
ART GISH : Yes, I knew her.
AMY GOODMAN : A few days before the invasion of Iraq &mdash;
ART GISH : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash;- she was killed in Gaza by an Israeli military bulldozer. She stood in front of a house -&mdash;
ART GISH : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash; just like you, standing to prevent it from being crushed. How did you know her?
ART GISH : I did some work for ISM . That’s the group she was working with, International Solidarity Movement. And I led the training for two days of nonviolence training for her, so I trained her to stand in front of bulldozers.
AMY GOODMAN : And your thoughts, your reaction after she was killed?
ART GISH : Well, that touched me very deeply, since I have some responsibility in that. But she’s one of my heroes, of course. And, you know, I think of the times I stood in front of tanks and bulldozers, and it could have happened to me.
AMY GOODMAN : And what happened in those cases? Explain exactly what you do. For example, talk about your experiences in Hebron. Did it happen there?
ART GISH : Yes. There was &mdash; in the main central produce market in Hebron, I saw two Israeli bulldozers, two Israeli tanks smashing the whole area. And a big tank came toward me, and I stood there, and it stopped, right in front of me. I didn’t realize that day that maybe I saved my wife&#8217;s life that day, because while she was kidnapped, she showed a picture of me standing in front of the tank to the kidnappers, and they were quite impressed and said we’re going to let you go.
AMY GOODMAN : You were in the West Bank. But you, when you were kidnapped, in Iraq.
PEGGY GISH : I was in Iraq, yes.
ART GISH : She was in &mdash; yes.
AMY GOODMAN : And you had this photograph with you?
PEGGY GISH : I had the photo with me and the photos of my family, my children, right, and showed that to them. And then they went out with it, and ten minutes later the guard came back in and said I would be released the next day with our translator.
AMY GOODMAN : What drives you to devote so much time to this kind of activism? For our radio listeners, your white hair, Art, your white beard. For kids who might think, what on earth are you doing? You live safely here in Athens, Ohio, but you’re constantly going off to places where you put your own lives in danger.
ART GISH : Well, first of all, it’s a privilege and a gift to be able to stand with the victims, with the oppressed of the world. That’s a privilege. I wouldn’t want to give it up for anything. What motivates us is our religious faith, our faith in God. And as Peggy put it so well, it’s love. It’s our love for the people that drives us.
AMY GOODMAN : Where were you born, Art?
ART GISH : Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
AMY GOODMAN : And Peggy?
PEGGY GISH : I was born actually in Nigeria. My parents were working there when I was very young. And then I grew up in Chicago.
AMY GOODMAN : And what got you involved in this peace work, Peggy?
PEGGY GISH : Ah, what got &mdash; well, we started our activism with civil rights work, and it a just opened the door to all kinds of other issues for us. Then we became involved with the anti-Vietnam War protests and draft resistance, death penalty abolition. And so, we began to see the interconnection with so many oppressions and problems, economic problems, with the war machine. And then we heard about a group that had a different kind of response, one that would be of standing with people and working with them nonviolently within their countries in those situations.
And so, as we worked in Iraq, we looked for those creative people who were interested, and we did a training with a group of Shia Muslims in Karbala in 2005, and they became known then as the Muslim Peacemaker Teams. With them, then we went into the city of Fallujah seven times during the year of 2005 to work for reconciliation between Sunni and Shia. So that’s the kind of thing that we do. And it’s exciting because we’re a part of a movement of the local people who are doing that and building that up for their country.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you planning to go back to the West Bank, Art? Peggy, to Iraq?
ART GISH : I hope to.
PEGGY GISH : I hope so.
ART GISH : Insha&#8217;Allah .
PEGGY GISH : Yes, we hope.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you both very much for being with us, Peggy and Art Gish.
ART GISH : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : They’ve written a number of books. Peggy&#8217;s book, Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace . Art Gish&#8217;s book, Hebron Journal: Stories of Nonviolent Peacemaking and At-Tuwani Journal: Hope and Nonviolent Action in a Palestinian Village . AMYGOODMAN:

Five years ago this month, in April of 2004, the first photographs from inside Abu Ghraib appeared in the US media. The photos showed Iraqi prisoners being tortured, abused and humiliated by US forces and private contractors.

While the first photos were broadcast on 60 Minutes and published in the pages of The New Yorker, the initial reports of torture actually came months earlier. Beginning in 2003, members of the Christian Peacemaker Team in Iraq began documenting dozens of cases of torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners inside US military facilities.

We’re joined right now, here at Ohio University in Athens, by two local peace activists, longtime members of the Christian Peacemaker Team, Peggy and Art Gish. Peggy Gish has worked in Iraq with Christian Peacemaker Teams since October of 2002. She helped document the first reports of abuse inside US prisons in Iraq. She’s author of Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace. Her husband, Art Gish, has been part of the Christian Peacemaker Teams in the West Bank since 1995. He’s the author of several books, including Hebron Journal: Stories of Nonviolent Peacemaking.

Thank you so much for being with us. It’s wonderful to have you with us. Peggy Gish, let’s being with you. President Obama just took a surprise trip to Iraq. You, yourself, were kidnapped there in Iraq.

PEGGYGISH:

Yes.

AMYGOODMAN:

Just talk to me.

PEGGYGISH:

I’m sorry, I’m not hearing you right.

AMYGOODMAN:

Oh, just listen to what I’m saying, just as I’m talking to you here. What happened to you in Iraq?

PEGGYGISH:

What happened in Iraq?

AMYGOODMAN:

Yes.

ARTGISH:

What happened to you in Iraq?

PEGGYGISH:

In Iraq, yes. Well, two of us were traveling to a very impoverished area in northwestern Iraq, and there were groups of people who wanted to work nonviolently to deal with the struggles there. And two of us were abducted on the way home. I was kept only two days, and my —

AMYGOODMAN:

Where?

PEGGYGISH:

In the compound out in a desert. And my colleague was kept for another six days. Then we were released unharmed, which we think has something to do with them hearing about the work of CPT and the kind of work that we were doing.

AMYGOODMAN:

Of the Christian Peacemaker Teams.

PEGGYGISH:

Yes.

AMYGOODMAN:

Well, talk about that, and your work being seminal in getting out the photographs of Abu Ghraib.

PEGGYGISH:

Yes. We started this work in the summer of 2003, and what — it grew out of just helping the Iraqi families that had people detained among their family. And then we began discovering gross abuse in all of the prisons of Iraq, not just Abu Ghraib. And there was a lot of brutality from the very beginning of the house raid in the middle of the night, where soldiers acknowledged that they had thirty seconds or forty seconds of absolute terror to subdue the people, and then brutality in the questioning, the interrogation process, torture going on in that process, as well as in the imprisonment time. So we were hearing stories from men and women who had been in Abu Ghraib and other prisons, and we compiled a report on seventy-two prisoners that became part of a pool of evidence, and we were one of several organizations, Iraqi and international groups, that put tremendous pressure on the system to make it public.

AMYGOODMAN:

Why have you chosen to live in Iraq for so many years under the gun, I mean, in the midst of the US attack, why you’ve chosen to live in Iraq?

PEGGYGISH:

Yes, why do I go back? I go there because I’ve been given a deep love for the Iraqi people, and love is really what has overcome the fear that I have to struggle with when I go there, but also because I am from a country that has done tremendous damage to their society, to the people, devastated the lives and culture of a people, and I want to do some small part in trying to help the people of Iraq, but also to let the people here know what is really happening there. So part of our work is just truth telling, witnessing what the occupation has done, what that has meant for people.

And it has been a horrible thing for the people of Iraq. It has meant up to a million people killed, a continued physical devastation of the country. There’s still very little clean water or electricity, very poor medical care. People have been traumatized. Friends tell us that they are so despairing and depressed and do not see much hope for the future of their country, at least not for generations. And so, it is a devastated country. And people say, “I don’t feel like it’s getting better.”

AMYGOODMAN:

When were you last there?

PEGGYGISH:

Two weeks ago. I just came back.

AMYGOODMAN:

What was your reaction to President Obama’s recent surprise trip this week and his calling for troop reductions in Iraq?

PEGGYGISH:

Yeah, I didn’t catch all that question.

ARTGISH: What was your reaction to Obama going to Iraq this week?

PEGGYGISH:

Yeah, I wish that Obama would be speaking out clearly, acknowledging the harm that the US has done there more clearly. And what we see and what Iraqis see is that Obama is just following in the same policies concerning Iraq that Bush has. The timetable for withdrawing is very similar to what Bush had put on the table. And they — I guess I’m afraid that he’s just being sucked into it, being pressured into a kind of aggressive military policy for dealing with the struggles of the world.

What’s happening with Iraq is now being transferred over into the work with Afghanistan, so we’re going to take troops from Iraq, but we’re going to increase the war there, the war on terror. And that is what we ought to be addressing, is our whole foreign policy, the way we are dealing with this whole problem of terrorism in the world.

AMYGOODMAN:

We’re talking to Peggy Gish. Her husband Art Gish, also a Christian Peacemaker. Art, you spend your time in the West Bank, in the Occupied Territories.

ARTGISH: Yes. Since 1995, I’ve been going to the West Bank every winter for three months. And I just came back from spending another three months there.

AMYGOODMAN:

Why? Why have you chosen to go there? And explain how the Christian Peacemaker Teams developed.

ARTGISH: Christian Peacemaker Teams came out of the peace churches, the Quakers, the Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren, out of the idea that if we’re really serious about peace, we ought to be willing to take the same risks as soldiers take and go into a nonviolent — into violent situations and be a nonviolent presence there. What if people who want peace made the same kind of commitment that soldiers make?

AMYGOODMAN:

What do you mean?

ARTGISH: That we go there, and we take risks, and we stand in the middle, and we work for peace in there.

AMYGOODMAN:

Explain what you’ve done in West Bank.

ARTGISH: OK. The most important thing we do is listen. And we listen to all sides. We act as international observers. I like to say we have the grandmother effect. There are things nobody would do if their grandmother is watching. So, in any conflict anywhere in the world, it’s really important to have outside observers there who are a presence there, and the people know they’re being watched, and that will reduce the violence.

And then, third, we also engage in nonviolent direct action. If the Israeli military wants to demolish a Palestinian house, we’ll sit on the roof of the house. We stand in front of tanks and bulldozers, and our slogan is "getting in the way."

AMYGOODMAN:

We just passed the anniversary of the death of Rachel Corrie on March 16th.

ARTGISH: Yes, I knew her.

AMYGOODMAN:

A few days before the invasion of Iraq —

ARTGISH:

Yes.

AMYGOODMAN:

—- she was killed in Gaza by an Israeli military bulldozer. She stood in front of a house -—

ARTGISH:

Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: — just like you, standing to prevent it from being crushed. How did you know her?

ARTGISH: I did some work for ISM. That’s the group she was working with, International Solidarity Movement. And I led the training for two days of nonviolence training for her, so I trained her to stand in front of bulldozers.

AMYGOODMAN:

And your thoughts, your reaction after she was killed?

ARTGISH: Well, that touched me very deeply, since I have some responsibility in that. But she’s one of my heroes, of course. And, you know, I think of the times I stood in front of tanks and bulldozers, and it could have happened to me.

AMYGOODMAN:

And what happened in those cases? Explain exactly what you do. For example, talk about your experiences in Hebron. Did it happen there?

ARTGISH: Yes. There was — in the main central produce market in Hebron, I saw two Israeli bulldozers, two Israeli tanks smashing the whole area. And a big tank came toward me, and I stood there, and it stopped, right in front of me. I didn’t realize that day that maybe I saved my wife’s life that day, because while she was kidnapped, she showed a picture of me standing in front of the tank to the kidnappers, and they were quite impressed and said we’re going to let you go.

AMYGOODMAN:

You were in the West Bank. But you, when you were kidnapped, in Iraq.

PEGGYGISH:

I was in Iraq, yes.

ARTGISH:

She was in — yes.

AMYGOODMAN:

And you had this photograph with you?

PEGGYGISH:

I had the photo with me and the photos of my family, my children, right, and showed that to them. And then they went out with it, and ten minutes later the guard came back in and said I would be released the next day with our translator.

AMYGOODMAN:

What drives you to devote so much time to this kind of activism? For our radio listeners, your white hair, Art, your white beard. For kids who might think, what on earth are you doing? You live safely here in Athens, Ohio, but you’re constantly going off to places where you put your own lives in danger.

ARTGISH: Well, first of all, it’s a privilege and a gift to be able to stand with the victims, with the oppressed of the world. That’s a privilege. I wouldn’t want to give it up for anything. What motivates us is our religious faith, our faith in God. And as Peggy put it so well, it’s love. It’s our love for the people that drives us.

AMYGOODMAN:

Where were you born, Art?

ARTGISH: Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

AMYGOODMAN:

And Peggy?

PEGGYGISH:

I was born actually in Nigeria. My parents were working there when I was very young. And then I grew up in Chicago.

AMYGOODMAN:

And what got you involved in this peace work, Peggy?

PEGGYGISH:

Ah, what got — well, we started our activism with civil rights work, and it a just opened the door to all kinds of other issues for us. Then we became involved with the anti-Vietnam War protests and draft resistance, death penalty abolition. And so, we began to see the interconnection with so many oppressions and problems, economic problems, with the war machine. And then we heard about a group that had a different kind of response, one that would be of standing with people and working with them nonviolently within their countries in those situations.

And so, as we worked in Iraq, we looked for those creative people who were interested, and we did a training with a group of Shia Muslims in Karbala in 2005, and they became known then as the Muslim Peacemaker Teams. With them, then we went into the city of Fallujah seven times during the year of 2005 to work for reconciliation between Sunni and Shia. So that’s the kind of thing that we do. And it’s exciting because we’re a part of a movement of the local people who are doing that and building that up for their country.

AMYGOODMAN:

Are you planning to go back to the West Bank, Art? Peggy, to Iraq?

ARTGISH: I hope to.

PEGGYGISH:

I hope so.

ARTGISH: Insha’Allah.

PEGGYGISH:

Yes, we hope.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both very much for being with us, Peggy and Art Gish.

ARTGISH:

Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: They’ve written a number of books. Peggy’s book,Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace. Art Gish’s book, Hebron Journal: Stories of Nonviolent Peacemaking and At-Tuwani Journal: Hope and Nonviolent Action in a Palestinian Village.

]]>
Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0400Senate Report Finds Rumsfeld Directly Responsible for US Torture of Prisonershttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/12/12/senate_report_finds_rumsfeld_directly_responsible
tag:democracynow.org,2008-12-12:en/story/50cd1c AMY GOODMAN : That’s Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera , &quot;Mack the Knife.&quot; I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Berlin, from East Berlin, that is. In fact, right around the corner is the theater where this is performed, the Bertolt Brecht Theatre.
We’re joined right now by a longtime German attorney to talk about a bipartisan Senate report that was released on Thursday that accused former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials of being directly responsible for the abuse and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and other US prisons.
The report stated, “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”
The report was released by Democratic Senator Carl Levin and Republican John McCain of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. It was based on a nearly two year Senate investigation. The report was issued as speculation is running high in Washington over whether President Bush will issue blanket pardons of officials involved in some of the administration&#8217;s more controversial counterterrorism programs.
I’m joined here in Berlin by human rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck. He is the General Secretary of the European Center of Constitutional and Human Rights. He has twice filed war crimes suits against Donald Rumsfeld in Germany.
Welcome to Democracy Now! , Wolfgang.
WOLFGANG KALECK : Hi, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : It’s good to have you with us. Let’s start off by talking about the significance of this US Senate report. It’s interesting that it’s not only the Democrat Carl Levin but the former Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
WOLFGANG KALECK : Well, the report is fine, as many other reports which have been released during the last four years, but, one has to say, it only confirms the information which was already on the table. We had a lot of revelations by colleagues of yours, by Jane Mayer, by other investigative journalists. We had the book of Philippe Sands. And it’s the last report in a row. So what we are interested in is the consequences of all this. You know, where does it lead to? When does the new administration take the necessary measure to deal with these crimes? And they were crimes.
AMY GOODMAN : Do we see any move in that direction with the Barack Obama &mdash; just what is being put out now, his selections for his cabinet? Of course, he’s not in power yet.
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah, we follow a vivid discussion right now in the US. Some people demand at least &mdash; and this is the minimum &mdash; some kind of truth commission with subpoena powers. But this is the absolute minimum. Yeah, and others, like Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights, demand strongly prosecution in the US. And we from Europe follow this process very carefully, because if nothing happens in the US or if Bush files preemptive pardon, we know it’s our turn again here in Europe.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about these lawsuits that you have filed against Donald Rumsfeld and also what most surprised you in the, I mean, US Senate report. You’ve been researching this for a long time, but it’s different when a body like the Senate says things like you have been saying.
WOLFGANG KALECK : No, actually, I’m very happy with the report. It’s another confirmation. And also, you know, it’s not only about dealing with these persons who are &mdash; some of them already left the administration. I’m not really interested in these persons, as such. I’m interested in a change of the attitude of the US military’s and the US Secret Service’s, and, of course, I’m interested in a restoration of the rule of law, and that requires investigation and prosecution. And we are very reluctant to have any firm opinion yet on that, because we have to wait for the 20th of January. But we will very carefully follow the first steps of the Obama administration.
AMY GOODMAN : And what most &mdash; what you think is most significant in the Senate report?
WOLFGANG KALECK : Well, there are strong conclusions, you know, like saying what we always were saying, that the US military and the CIA were using the methods of the old enemies in the Cold War, like waterboarding, which was used by North Korea, by North Vietnam and by China and the Soviet Union. So, this was already on the table. This is like ridiculous. But it’s good that it’s now being said by a congressional report, of course.
AMY GOODMAN : Your lawsuits that you’ve brought against Donald Rumsfeld &mdash;-
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash;- together with the Center for Constitutional Rights &mdash;-
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash;- explain what they are and where they’ve gone and why you, as a German attorney, are involved with this at all.
WOLFGANG KALECK : The Center approached us in Germany four years ago, when there was nearly total impunity in the US and no attempts at all to be seen that any other than the “rotten apples,” the twelve persons from the night shift in Abu Ghraib, should be sued for what happened in Abu Ghraib. And so, in 2004, we filed the first lawsuit here in Germany. Actually, it was linked with what you have been discussing right now, because many of the mother units of the acting persons in Abu Ghraib were stationed in Germany, so there was even a territorial connection. Four of the twelve persons &mdash; other than Rumsfeld, four of the twelve persons were stationed in Germany. So Germany &mdash; in our opinion, Germany had the obligation to pursue this. And against Rumsfeld, our complaint was based on the universal jurisdiction laws in Germany. So that was 2004.
AMY GOODMAN : Explain universal jurisdiction.
WOLFGANG KALECK : Universal jurisdiction is when there is, yeah, no territorial link or no person, no citizen from the country, neither as an actor nor as a victim, as someone involved in the crime. So when there is no connection at all to the country, many countries in the world now have so-called universal jurisdiction laws, which allow them to investigate and prosecute if the state where the crime occurred and if the International Criminal Court won’t take the case. So &mdash; but this is only one side of the game.
The other side is what we always said. Yeah, we tried to blame Rumsfeld for &mdash; and others, of course, especially the lawyers &mdash; for what they’ve done in conducting the torture program, but we don&#8217;t have to forget that &mdash; and this is not about universal jurisdiction. This is about territorial jurisdiction and about personal jurisdiction. We have many, many European countries right now with pending lawsuits because of their involvement in the US torture program. So we have ongoing trials in Italy, in Spain. We have &mdash;- even now in Bosnia, in Poland, we have brave prosecutors who are investigating against their own officials. We have parliamentary inquiries. We have criminal investigations in Denmark, in Holland, in many other countries.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you explain a few of these?
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : Because I think there’s very little sense in the United States of what goes on outside of the United States.
WOLFGANG KALECK : You know that the CIA rendition program was called by one investigator of the Council of Europe a “spider’s web.” So, this is to demonstrate the power of the CIA , like covering the whole world with their stations and using air bases all over the world to kidnap people, to torture them and to bring them anywhere.
AMY GOODMAN : By rendition. You’re referring to extraordinary rendition.
WOLFGANG KALECK : By rendition, yeah. I’m referring to the CIA extraordinary rendition program. So, on one hand, this really seems like a very powerful demonstration. On the other hand, they leave traces. Everywhere they act, there is jurisdiction on their actions. So they acted in Italy, for example. They kidnapped a Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, and brought him to Egypt, where he was really brutally tortured. And a brave prosecutor in Italy investigated the case and now is standing on trial against not only CIA agents, but also against the heads of the Italian secret service who helped the CIA .
AMY GOODMAN : But the CIA agents, of course, are not there. They’re being tried in absentia .
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : So, what does it mean? It means they can never return to Italy?
WOLFGANG KALECK : They can never return. There are arrest warrants, like there are arrest warrants in Germany against twelve CIA agents. So -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : What happened here in Germany?
WOLFGANG KALECK : In Germany, it’s all because of the case of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped in Macedonia and then brought to Afghanistan and then returned to Germany. You know what? But what this means is, four years ago, everybody said suing &mdash; a lawsuit against US CIA agents, against US militarists, never brings you anywhere. And four years later, we find ourself in a situation where we have to say, this is, of course, not enough, but this is more than nothing. A lot has been happening. So, many, many lawyers, many prosecutors, many judges in several European countries took action, and I think there is more to come up. And it depends very much &mdash;- there is much hope on the Obama administration, but it will depend very much if there is really something going on in the US. If not, I guess there will be more and more lawsuits here in Europe.
AMY GOODMAN : Wolfgang Kaleck, your first lawsuit against Rumsfeld in 2004, that was thrown out by the German government.
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah, that was a nice one, because we filed the lawsuit in late 2004, and they were somehow revising our complaint, because it was a very strong, long complaint. And Rumsfeld announced at a certain point that he wouldn’t come to Germany because of that pending lawsuit. And he wanted to come to the Munich Security Conference on 11th of February in 2005, and so the German prosecutor filed the dismissal on the 10th of February, 2005, one day before, so that Rumsfeld could attend the Munich Security Conference, which he did. So, that was -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : Was the US bringing a lot of pressure to throw this out?
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah, it seems so. It seems so, because there were also upcoming visits of Condoleezza Rice and re-elected President George Bush by that time.
This attitude of the Germans, which was obviously politically motivated, gave us a fair chance to file a new lawsuit in 2006, where actually not only the Center for Constitutional Rights and we, the Germans, filed the case, but fifty organizations all over the world backed the case. And so, yeah, you know that the case gained a lot of public attention and also initiated a discussion that international justice has to be more than special justice for fallen dictators from Southern countries or special tribunals for Africa. If international justice wants to be taken serious in the future, it has to go after the powerful perpetrators also of the West and the North.
AMY GOODMAN : Wolfgang Kaleck, we’re sitting here in a studio in Berlin, East Berlin, to be exact. For those who are listening on radio, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. You’ll see the backdrop of this broadcast, significant buildings and monuments in Berlin. Can you talk about your concern &mdash; against the backdrop of this history, give us a quick one-minute tour of Berlin and its significant places. Even in the break, we were playing Bertolt Brecht&#8217;s Threepenny Opera , “Mack the Knife.” The significance of Bertolt Brecht here, a theater right around the corner.
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah. You know, we’re facing the Victory Column, where Barack Obama gave his speech in July. And this was actually a demonstration of war, because Germany was leading many wars in the past.
AMY GOODMAN : And we’re showing that backdrop right now.
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : This was where &mdash; the significance of that place, where Barack Obama spoke?
WOLFGANG KALECK : Yeah, yeah. Berlin is full of monuments of war. And the Brandenburg Gate was the place, just where we’re sitting here &mdash; that was the first demonstration of Adolf Hitler when he was elected as a chancellor. So we have dealt a lot with impunity. And actually, you know, the Nazi &mdash; the whole chapter of the Nazi crimes was never, never really challenged by German justice. So, maybe we the Germans are not the best persons to tell others how to tackle impunity, but some of us learned a lot during the last years.
AMY GOODMAN : And the significance of the wall coming down that divides where we are in East Berlin from West Berlin, that many people don’t even refer to east and west anymore, thinking of it as one united city now, the government back here at the Reichstag?
WOLFGANG KALECK : Now, that’s &mdash; the interesting thing for us with the fall of the wall is that it showed that history is open, and sometimes things may happen that you haven’t expected in years before. And that’s, you know, what we are also experiencing with our work against impunity in Southern America, because we deal with cases against Chilean and Argentinean military officers, where, thirty years after the crimes during the dictatorships in the ’70s, these people now find themselves on trial. And so, this is our hope, that the continuous work of human rights organizations, of lawyers and organizations all over the world will at some point result in investigation and prosecution against US torturers.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us today. Wolfgang Kaleck is the General Secretary of the European Center of Constitutional and Human Rights, as we wrap up our trip through Sweden and Germany. We’ll be back in New York on Monday, and we’ll be dealing with the issue of extraordinary rendition there, as well.AMYGOODMAN: That’s Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, "Mack the Knife." I’m Amy Goodman. We’re broadcasting from Berlin, from East Berlin, that is. In fact, right around the corner is the theater where this is performed, the Bertolt Brecht Theatre.

We’re joined right now by a longtime German attorney to talk about a bipartisan Senate report that was released on Thursday that accused former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials of being directly responsible for the abuse and torture of prisoners at Guantanamo and other US prisons.

The report stated, “The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

The report was released by Democratic Senator Carl Levin and Republican John McCain of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. It was based on a nearly two year Senate investigation. The report was issued as speculation is running high in Washington over whether President Bush will issue blanket pardons of officials involved in some of the administration’s more controversial counterterrorism programs.

I’m joined here in Berlin by human rights attorney Wolfgang Kaleck. He is the General Secretary of the European Center of Constitutional and Human Rights. He has twice filed war crimes suits against Donald Rumsfeld in Germany.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Wolfgang.

WOLFGANGKALECK: Hi, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Let’s start off by talking about the significance of this US Senate report. It’s interesting that it’s not only the Democrat Carl Levin but the former Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

WOLFGANGKALECK: Well, the report is fine, as many other reports which have been released during the last four years, but, one has to say, it only confirms the information which was already on the table. We had a lot of revelations by colleagues of yours, by Jane Mayer, by other investigative journalists. We had the book of Philippe Sands. And it’s the last report in a row. So what we are interested in is the consequences of all this. You know, where does it lead to? When does the new administration take the necessary measure to deal with these crimes? And they were crimes.

AMYGOODMAN: Do we see any move in that direction with the Barack Obama — just what is being put out now, his selections for his cabinet? Of course, he’s not in power yet.

WOLFGANGKALECK: Yeah, we follow a vivid discussion right now in the US. Some people demand at least — and this is the minimum — some kind of truth commission with subpoena powers. But this is the absolute minimum. Yeah, and others, like Michael Ratner from the Center for Constitutional Rights, demand strongly prosecution in the US. And we from Europe follow this process very carefully, because if nothing happens in the US or if Bush files preemptive pardon, we know it’s our turn again here in Europe.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about these lawsuits that you have filed against Donald Rumsfeld and also what most surprised you in the, I mean, US Senate report. You’ve been researching this for a long time, but it’s different when a body like the Senate says things like you have been saying.

WOLFGANGKALECK: No, actually, I’m very happy with the report. It’s another confirmation. And also, you know, it’s not only about dealing with these persons who are — some of them already left the administration. I’m not really interested in these persons, as such. I’m interested in a change of the attitude of the US military’s and the US Secret Service’s, and, of course, I’m interested in a restoration of the rule of law, and that requires investigation and prosecution. And we are very reluctant to have any firm opinion yet on that, because we have to wait for the 20th of January. But we will very carefully follow the first steps of the Obama administration.

AMYGOODMAN: And what most — what you think is most significant in the Senate report?

WOLFGANGKALECK: Well, there are strong conclusions, you know, like saying what we always were saying, that the US military and the CIA were using the methods of the old enemies in the Cold War, like waterboarding, which was used by North Korea, by North Vietnam and by China and the Soviet Union. So, this was already on the table. This is like ridiculous. But it’s good that it’s now being said by a congressional report, of course.

AMYGOODMAN: —- explain what they are and where they’ve gone and why you, as a German attorney, are involved with this at all.

WOLFGANGKALECK: The Center approached us in Germany four years ago, when there was nearly total impunity in the US and no attempts at all to be seen that any other than the “rotten apples,” the twelve persons from the night shift in Abu Ghraib, should be sued for what happened in Abu Ghraib. And so, in 2004, we filed the first lawsuit here in Germany. Actually, it was linked with what you have been discussing right now, because many of the mother units of the acting persons in Abu Ghraib were stationed in Germany, so there was even a territorial connection. Four of the twelve persons — other than Rumsfeld, four of the twelve persons were stationed in Germany. So Germany — in our opinion, Germany had the obligation to pursue this. And against Rumsfeld, our complaint was based on the universal jurisdiction laws in Germany. So that was 2004.

AMYGOODMAN: Explain universal jurisdiction.

WOLFGANGKALECK: Universal jurisdiction is when there is, yeah, no territorial link or no person, no citizen from the country, neither as an actor nor as a victim, as someone involved in the crime. So when there is no connection at all to the country, many countries in the world now have so-called universal jurisdiction laws, which allow them to investigate and prosecute if the state where the crime occurred and if the International Criminal Court won’t take the case. So — but this is only one side of the game.

The other side is what we always said. Yeah, we tried to blame Rumsfeld for — and others, of course, especially the lawyers — for what they’ve done in conducting the torture program, but we don’t have to forget that — and this is not about universal jurisdiction. This is about territorial jurisdiction and about personal jurisdiction. We have many, many European countries right now with pending lawsuits because of their involvement in the US torture program. So we have ongoing trials in Italy, in Spain. We have —- even now in Bosnia, in Poland, we have brave prosecutors who are investigating against their own officials. We have parliamentary inquiries. We have criminal investigations in Denmark, in Holland, in many other countries.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you explain a few of these?

WOLFGANGKALECK: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: Because I think there’s very little sense in the United States of what goes on outside of the United States.

WOLFGANGKALECK: You know that the CIA rendition program was called by one investigator of the Council of Europe a “spider’s web.” So, this is to demonstrate the power of the CIA, like covering the whole world with their stations and using air bases all over the world to kidnap people, to torture them and to bring them anywhere.

WOLFGANGKALECK: By rendition, yeah. I’m referring to the CIA extraordinary rendition program. So, on one hand, this really seems like a very powerful demonstration. On the other hand, they leave traces. Everywhere they act, there is jurisdiction on their actions. So they acted in Italy, for example. They kidnapped a Muslim cleric, Abu Omar, and brought him to Egypt, where he was really brutally tortured. And a brave prosecutor in Italy investigated the case and now is standing on trial against not only CIA agents, but also against the heads of the Italian secret service who helped the CIA.

AMYGOODMAN: But the CIA agents, of course, are not there. They’re being tried in absentia.

WOLFGANGKALECK: Yeah, yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: So, what does it mean? It means they can never return to Italy?

WOLFGANGKALECK: They can never return. There are arrest warrants, like there are arrest warrants in Germany against twelve CIA agents. So -—

AMYGOODMAN: What happened here in Germany?

WOLFGANGKALECK: In Germany, it’s all because of the case of Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped in Macedonia and then brought to Afghanistan and then returned to Germany. You know what? But what this means is, four years ago, everybody said suing — a lawsuit against US CIA agents, against US militarists, never brings you anywhere. And four years later, we find ourself in a situation where we have to say, this is, of course, not enough, but this is more than nothing. A lot has been happening. So, many, many lawyers, many prosecutors, many judges in several European countries took action, and I think there is more to come up. And it depends very much —- there is much hope on the Obama administration, but it will depend very much if there is really something going on in the US. If not, I guess there will be more and more lawsuits here in Europe.

AMYGOODMAN: Wolfgang Kaleck, your first lawsuit against Rumsfeld in 2004, that was thrown out by the German government.

WOLFGANGKALECK: Yeah, that was a nice one, because we filed the lawsuit in late 2004, and they were somehow revising our complaint, because it was a very strong, long complaint. And Rumsfeld announced at a certain point that he wouldn’t come to Germany because of that pending lawsuit. And he wanted to come to the Munich Security Conference on 11th of February in 2005, and so the German prosecutor filed the dismissal on the 10th of February, 2005, one day before, so that Rumsfeld could attend the Munich Security Conference, which he did. So, that was -—

AMYGOODMAN: Was the US bringing a lot of pressure to throw this out?

WOLFGANGKALECK: Yeah, it seems so. It seems so, because there were also upcoming visits of Condoleezza Rice and re-elected President George Bush by that time.

This attitude of the Germans, which was obviously politically motivated, gave us a fair chance to file a new lawsuit in 2006, where actually not only the Center for Constitutional Rights and we, the Germans, filed the case, but fifty organizations all over the world backed the case. And so, yeah, you know that the case gained a lot of public attention and also initiated a discussion that international justice has to be more than special justice for fallen dictators from Southern countries or special tribunals for Africa. If international justice wants to be taken serious in the future, it has to go after the powerful perpetrators also of the West and the North.

AMYGOODMAN: Wolfgang Kaleck, we’re sitting here in a studio in Berlin, East Berlin, to be exact. For those who are listening on radio, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. You’ll see the backdrop of this broadcast, significant buildings and monuments in Berlin. Can you talk about your concern — against the backdrop of this history, give us a quick one-minute tour of Berlin and its significant places. Even in the break, we were playing Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, “Mack the Knife.” The significance of Bertolt Brecht here, a theater right around the corner.

WOLFGANGKALECK: Yeah. You know, we’re facing the Victory Column, where Barack Obama gave his speech in July. And this was actually a demonstration of war, because Germany was leading many wars in the past.

AMYGOODMAN: And we’re showing that backdrop right now.

WOLFGANGKALECK: Yeah, yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: This was where — the significance of that place, where Barack Obama spoke?

WOLFGANGKALECK: Yeah, yeah. Berlin is full of monuments of war. And the Brandenburg Gate was the place, just where we’re sitting here — that was the first demonstration of Adolf Hitler when he was elected as a chancellor. So we have dealt a lot with impunity. And actually, you know, the Nazi — the whole chapter of the Nazi crimes was never, never really challenged by German justice. So, maybe we the Germans are not the best persons to tell others how to tackle impunity, but some of us learned a lot during the last years.

AMYGOODMAN: And the significance of the wall coming down that divides where we are in East Berlin from West Berlin, that many people don’t even refer to east and west anymore, thinking of it as one united city now, the government back here at the Reichstag?

WOLFGANGKALECK: Now, that’s — the interesting thing for us with the fall of the wall is that it showed that history is open, and sometimes things may happen that you haven’t expected in years before. And that’s, you know, what we are also experiencing with our work against impunity in Southern America, because we deal with cases against Chilean and Argentinean military officers, where, thirty years after the crimes during the dictatorships in the ’70s, these people now find themselves on trial. And so, this is our hope, that the continuous work of human rights organizations, of lawyers and organizations all over the world will at some point result in investigation and prosecution against US torturers.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much for being with us today. Wolfgang Kaleck is the General Secretary of the European Center of Constitutional and Human Rights, as we wrap up our trip through Sweden and Germany. We’ll be back in New York on Monday, and we’ll be dealing with the issue of extraordinary rendition there, as well.]]>

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500Winter Soldier on the Hill: War Vets Testify Before Congresshttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/28/winter_soldier_on_the_hill_war
tag:democracynow.org,2008-11-28:en/story/560978 AMY GOODMAN : War veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan came to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress and give an eyewitness account about the horrors of war. Like the Winter Soldier hearings in March, when more than 200 service members gathered for four days in Silver Spring, Maryland to give their eyewitness accounts of the injustices occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan, Winter Soldier on the Hill was designed to drive home the human cost of war and occupation &mdash; this time, to the very people in charge of doing something about it.
The name “Winter Soldier” comes from a similar event in 1971, when hundreds of Vietnam vets gathered in Detroit. The term is derived from the opening line of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet The Crisis , published in 1776. &quot;These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman,” Paine wrote.
Well, in a packed public hearing, the soldiers testified before a panel of lawmakers from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Today, we spend the hour with their testimony. We begin with former Marine sniper, Sergio Kochergin, giving a firsthand, behind-the-scenes account of the initial days of the US invasion of Iraq.
SERGIO KOCHERGIN : As we cleared all the buildings and moved into the city, and we finally had a time to take a little break, we found a lot of left-behind vehicles, from pickup trucks all the way to luxury Toyota Avalons with leather and sunroofs, which we used for perimeter patrolling. The pickup trucks and the other vehicles were used for the car derby. We would either ram into each other or just ram into the walls, while Iraqi people watched us and were asking for vehicles. We knew they were going to loot the cars, so we just destroyed them, so that the people would not have a chance to take them, except for the scraps.
We also were exposed to a lot of dead Iraqi citizens, either enemy combatants or innocent civilians who were killed by initial air strikes or invasion. At one point, after approaching dead bodies of about four people, we began to take pictures and tried to move and flip them over to try and identify them as civilians or enemy combatants. A few days later, a family of the killed came by and asked if we found anyone who was killed nearby. Me and another Marine led the family to the dead corpses, and they were identified as their sons and uncles and nephews of the family. It was very hard to see the pain in the people’s eyes from their loss. They began to cry and point at us and at the sky and telling us that the planes killed them, and it was our fault also. But we tried to explain to them that it wasn’t us.
Imam Ali Mosque in al-Najaf, Iraq, an influential Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, was killed with another 122 innocent people on August 30th of 2003. A few of our Marines went to the hospital to provide security for all the relatives that were trying to contact their families. When they came back, they said they have never seen so much blood before. They said that they couldn’t even see the ground, so much blood and body parts were everywhere. The suicide bombing was placed by al-Hakim’s political and religious opponent, al-Sadr. Unknown number of attacks have been organized by al-Sadr’s militia against innocent people of Iraq and against the occupying forces.
One other responsibility we had in al-Najaf was to guard an ammunition supply point about thirty miles northeast from our base. Our job consisted of patrolling ASB , and when we came into contact with Iraqis stealing stuff, we would take a physical action and to make sure they would never come back. We would shoot their tires out or shoot their windows, putting them on their knees like we’re about to execute them and just shoot in the air and laugh and yell at them and tell them that the next time will be worse. Our orders directly from command was to roughen up all the guys up. They would always tell us that everybody is an enemy and that we can’t trust them and the only way to keep them in place is to put as much fear as possible and to let them know that we’re not playing around. During the deployment in al-Najaf, nothing was fixed or intended on being fixed at all, except keeping the city in the occupied hands and instill the fear into the people at every chance we got.
My second deployment was in the city of Husaybah in Al Anbar province in Al Qaim region on the Syrian border. First thing I want to talk about is the drop weapons. Drop weapons are the weapons that are given to us by our chain of command in case we kill somebody without any weapons, and so that we would not get into trouble. We would carry an AK-47, and if the person that was shot did not have the weapon, an AK-47 would be placed at his corpse, and when the unit would come back to the base, they would turn it in to identify the shot man as the enemy combatant. The weapons could not come from anywhere else but the higher chain of command, because after the raid, all weapons were turned in into the armory and should have been recorded.
Two months into deployment, our rules of engagement changed to a personnel with having a bag and a shovel at the intersection or on the roads, that they were suspicious. This gave us a bigger window on who we can engage. Looking at the situation, this point of view, a lot of enemy combatants that we shot were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were tired, mad, angry, and we just wanted to go home and stop this killing of our brothers. One of our intelligence officers told us that they received a call from one of the sources in the city telling them that there are fliers posted all over the town that says that there are unknown snipers in the city, they kill the insurgents and the civilians. We did not take into consideration that the innocent people are being killed by us, because every time we sent the pictures to the command post through the interlink system, we would receive an approval to kill people with shovels and the bags.
Now, I know that it wasn’t right to do that, but when you trust those who act like they care for you, you listen to them and follow their orders, because you don’t want to let your friends down. “What if?” was used as a propaganda and a way to relieve our minds from the actions we have partaken in and make it easier on us.
Another thing I want to touch on is, problems with equipment are another big problem. Where is all the money going that is given to the military? During my first deployment, I had a Vietnam-era flak jacket without a plate. My M-16 was made back in the late ’70s. We did not have enough night-vision goggles for everyone. While Marines are patrolling in the Hummers every day and get blown up, because the only protection they have are the flak blankets hanging from the doors, while generals and colonels and other high-ranking officers that leave a base once in awhile have brand new, fully armored Hummers that are always spotless clean sitting on the base, while other Hummers are bleeding with our brothers’, sons’, daughters’, sisters’ blood every day.
When we all come back from Iraq and we seek help from our command, they call us “weak” and “cowards.” The lines for a psychologist is almost a year long, and the only thing that can help us is the alcohol and the prescription pills they’re giving out to us like candy to keep us down, because it seems like doctors don’t want to do their job and they just don’t care. Use of drugs amongst the military units is critical. We lost numerous numbers of people from failing drug tests. They either want to get out, or they’re just so messed up, and the only one thing that can help them to escape is the drugs.
The last thing I want to tell you is about a roommate who we shared a bathroom with, a Marine who was on the suicide watch for about few months on and off. The last three weeks before we were deployed, he was constantly on watch. A week before family day, when the family comes in and says goodbye to their Marines before we deploy, he was released from the watch, so that he would not say anything to his parents, and he did not say anything to them. About a month into deployment, he blew his brains out in the shower stall. Actions like that show the poor judgment of our command just to have numbers for the troops and just to keep their own skins safe. The Marine should have never gone to Iraq in the first place, and nobody was held responsible for his death. If there is no care for your own Marines, what care do they have for the people of Iraq when they give the orders?
I want to thank you for your time, and I believe that you will make a right decision and will help us to stop this inhumane treatment of Iraqi people and the troops and stop occupation of Iraq and help us to bring troops home. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : Former Marine sniper, Sergio Kochergin. Next up is former Army Captain Luis Montalvan. He worked extensively for General David Petraeus.
LUIS MONTALVAN : I wrote countless memoranda to my superiors requesting more resources and personnel, but they went unanswered. In Iraq, I witnessed many disturbing things. I witnessed waterboarding. I was given unlawful orders by superiors to not offer humanitarian assistance to refugees caught between Syrian and Iraqi borders. I disobeyed those orders. I witnessed and participated in countless massive operations led by American commanders whose metrics for success were numbers of detainees apprehended without regard to the real effects: tribal, ethnic, sectarian strife conducted by American taxpayer-uniformed and -equipped militias the US military calls Iraqi Security Forces.
Most reprehensible was that we have never had close to the amount of troops we needed in Iraq. Yet from 2003 until today, General Sanchez, Casey and Petraeus, among others, did not heed the requests of their subordinate officers for more resources and more troops. Instead, they perpetually painted a rosy picture of the situation to the country, while the country fell into civil war. These generals consistently overstated the strength and number of Iraqi Security Forces to Congress and still do. The misrepresentation of the facts should be grounds for courts-martial and criminal indictments.
I lost many friends in Iraq, American and Iraqi. Many Iraqi friends continue to suffer as refugees inside and outside of Iraq. As a matter of fact, an Iraqi friend, whom I consider a brother, named Ali, is meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Jordan today to process his application for asylum under the United States Refugee Admissions Program. Recently, Ali contacted me through my website asking for help. As a result, a few of my comrades in the US Army sent him letters of support, since he frequently risked his life to help us in 2003 and 2004. I pray that Ali and many others are quickly helped.
I wish to focus this letter, Ted, on things we struggled &mdash; we both struggled with enormously: negligence, dereliction of duty and corruption. You believe Generals Joseph Fil and David Petraeus were negligent and committed dereliction of duty. So do I. In the note you addressed to Generals Petraeus and Fil found by your body that the Army says is your, quote, “suicide note,” you stated, quote, “You are only interested in your careers and provide no support to your staff, no mission support, and you don’t care. I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuses and liars. I am sullied no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves.” The members of your family believe this note is a part of a journal entry that was removed and placed near your body. Moreover, they told me that they have not received your journal, among other personal effects.
While at the port of entry at Al Waleed in 2003, among the many memoranda I submitted to my superiors was a report expressing the need for an automated tracking system for immigration and emigration. General Ricardo Sanchez and Paul Bremer sent a delegation to Al Waleed to assess the port of entry for installation of the Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System, known as the PISCES , to provide tracking of transnational movement of immigration and emigration. When the team departed, they informed me that the facilities would support installation of the PISCES . By the time my unit, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, left in March 2004, PISCES had not been emplaced.
In 2005, I returned to Iraq for a second tour. Assigned as the regimental Iraqi Security Forces coordinator working for Colonel H.R. McMaster, who has today been slotted for general, among my duties was to oversee the development and security of the northern half of the secured &mdash; of the Syrian-Iraqi border at the port of entry at Rabia. On June 2005, Commander Guy Vilardi, working for Multi-National Corps-Iraq, informed me that CPATT , a sub-entity, had possessed a dozen PISCES in containers located in Baghdad. He also informed me that they would install the systems in the near future.
Upon return to western Nineveh province, I informed my superiors, including Colonel McMaster. In August 2005, General Joseph Fil, commander of CPATT , visited Rabiya and briefed us &mdash; so that we could brief him on the status of the Syrian-Iraqi Border. We briefed General Fil, who scoffed at the notion of the installation of the PISCES system and stated that the system was no good, and we don’t have them anyhow. I informed General Fil of my conversation with Commander Vilardi, to which General Fil replied, “That’s not true, and the PISCES is no good anyhow.” In January of 2006, shortly before departure from my second tour, Colonel Carl Lammers of the United States Marine Corps Reserve, sent an email on a secure network indicating that, in fact, the PISCES systems were in containers in Baghdad. I was outraged. As of March 2006, when the 3rd ACR departed western Nineveh province, no PISCES or equivalent tracking system had been installed in the Rabiya POE .
From 2007 &mdash; from 2003 to 2007, no computer systems for tracking immigration or emigration installed &mdash; were installed along the Syrian-Iraqi border. This surely contributed to the instability of Iraq. Foreign fighters and criminals were free to move transnationally with little fear of apprehension. It is probable that significant numbers of Americans and Iraqis were wounded and killed as a result of this.
My &mdash; I see that I have one minute left, so I’ll skip down to one more important point. I witnessed contractual corruption on the point of Lee Dynamics International. I have written testimony, notes from Brigadier General &mdash; then-Brigadier General Bergner, on page four, elucidating the fact that General Petraeus and General Fil had no systems of accountability for thousands of weapons and no standard operating procedures for the procurement, stowage and dissemination of that equipment.
And lastly, I would end that, you know, for the past year and a half, myself and a number of fellow veterans of Iraq have co-authored pieces in the Washington Post , the New York Times , the San Francisco Chronicle , among a number of other media outlets. And we have beaten our drum to try to raise the issue of the dereliction of duty committed by a number of generals who have been promoted and promoted again and continue to perpetuate the lies and paint a rosy picture of the situation of Iraq.
VINCENT EMANUELE : My name is Vincent J.R. Emanuele. I am a resident of Indiana, and I served with the United States Marine Corps from September 2002 through January of 2006 with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, Alpha Company, 3rd Platoon as a rifleman and a squad automatic machine gunner. I was deployed to Iraq in August of 2004, where I spent my time in Iraq as a rifleman in 3rd Squad, 1st Team, 3rd Platoon. Our area of operation was a small border town a mile south of the Euphrates and fifteen miles east of Syria called Al Qaim, Iraq.
The issues I will be discussing today include rules of the engagement, or the breakdown thereof, the death of innocents, the destruction of civilian property, the abuse of prisoners, and the mishandling of the dead, all of which took place during the duration of our tour in Iraq. These stories are not mine alone. These are our stories, the stories of 3rd Platoon. I had the chance &mdash; I had the chance to speak with several members from my platoon, and these are the events they and I felt were pertinent to discuss with you today.
An act that took place quite often in Iraq was that of taking pop shots at cars that drove by. This was quite easy for most Marines to get away with, because our rules of engagement stated that the town of Al Qaim had already been forewarned and knew to pull their cars to a complete stop when approaching a United States convoy. Our rules of engagement stated that we should first fire warning shots into the ground in front of the car, then the engine block, and then the driver and passengers. Most of the time, however, the shots made their way straight to those very individuals in the car. That is if the car was even moving in the first place. Many times, cars that had actually pulled off to the side of the road were also shot at. Of course, the consequences of such actions posed a huge problem for those of us who patrolled the streets every day. This was not the best way to become friendlier with an already very hostile local population. This was not an isolated incident and took place for most of my eight-month deployment.
In one particular instance, we were sent on a mission to blow up a bridge that was being used to transport weapons across the Euphrates. During this mission, we were ambushed and were forced to return fire in order to make our way out of the city. There are several problems with instances such as these. First, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to clearly identify hostile targets. This resulted in our unit firing into the town with little or no identification of these hostile targets. Because of inadequate intelligence and lack of personnel or competent leadership, our platoon lost a good Marine that day, and I lost my best friend.
The retrans site, otherwise known as a retransmission site, was a communications post set up on a plateau overlooking the town of Al Qaim. This communications site was there to provide communications between the main base at the railroad station where we were stationed and an outpost in Husaybah, Iraq, where Bravo Company’s area of operations took place. We would encounter mortar fire on a daily basis. Most of the time, we would return this fire with mortar fire of our own. Some of the time, the counter-battery would call in a specific location for us to exchange fire. On occasion, when the counter-battery could not call in a specific location, our unit would fire upon the town anyway, sometimes in the hills off to the west of the town where we thought the mortar fire was coming from and other times straight into the town of Al Qaim itself, onto buildings, houses and businesses. Because of the lack of personnel at the retrans site, very rarely, if ever, did we conduct a battle damage assessment report to report civilian deaths and destruction. So almost all the time these incidents went unreported and not investigated. This was not an isolated incident, as well.
Another mission our platoon was tasked to take on was that of transporting prisoners from our detention facility on base back to the desert. The reason I say the desert and not their town is because that is exactly where we would drop them off, in the middle of nowhere. Now, most of these men had obviously been deemed innocent, or else they would have been moved to a more permanent detention facility and not released back into the local population. Our unit engaged in punching, kicking, butt stroking or generally harassing and abusing these very prisoners until the point at which our unit would be take them in the middle of the desert, miles from their respective homes, and at times throw them out of the back of our Humvees, all the while continually punching, kicking and at times even throwing softball-sized rocks at their backs as they ran away. This, once again, was not an isolated incident.
Possibly the most disturbing of what took place in Iraq was the mishandling of the dead. On several occasions, our convoy came across bodies that had been decapitated and were lying on the road, sometimes for weeks. When encountering these bodies, standard procedure was to run over the corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures, which was also a standard practice when encountering the dead in Iraq &mdash; this, along with neglecting to account for many of those who were killed or wounded. On one specific occasion, after I had personally shot a man attempting to flee while planting a roadside bomb, we drug his body out of the ditch he was laying in, and we subsequently left that body &mdash; slide please &mdash; we subsequently left that body to rot in the field, where we saw this man up to a week later.
These are just a few of the disturbing and unacceptable stories I could share with you from my time in Iraq. Others would include continually dehumanizing Iraqis by referring to them as “hajis” or “sand niggers.” Even the racist and sexist nature that exists within the military itself, which was obviously &mdash; overtly obvious on a daily basis. I could also tell story upon story of families being destroyed as a result of an occupation that unfortunately should have never taken place. Several members of my platoon &mdash; several members of my platoon went through divorces and/or separations, many of the time with children involved.
I could also testify to the overwhelming majority of those I served with who did not think dying in Iraq was honorable or acceptable, nor did they enjoy or want to go back to Iraq a second or third time. Unfortunately, because of personal circumstances, whether they be financial or family issues, many indeed were deployed up to three times during their four-year enlistment. In fact, many, including myself, at times did not have intention of helping the Iraqis. Because of the hostile intent, as well as the loss of lives close to us, our best friends, our unit had a general disdain and distaste for Iraqis and their country. Further, our unit, for the most part, did not trust our command and had a general mistrust and distaste of this occupation from its inception onward.
I could also speak to the personal attacks veterans, including myself and many others, had to encounter once we were willing to be treated for PTSD within our unit. The idea of being a real Marine that does not complain when coming back home and who sucks it up and just does the job that we were tasked to do, this mentality resulted in many of the Marines I served with, including myself, turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with the horrors of this bloody occupation.
AMY GOODMAN : Marine Corps rifleman Vincent Emanuele testifying before Congress. We’ll be back with more from Winter Soldier on the Hill in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We return now to Winter Soldier on the Hill and to war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan testifying before Congress about the horrors of war.
ADAM KOKESH : I think my background can best be summarized by a form that I filled out 9 June, 1999 at the military entrance processing station after enlisting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, entitled “Why I Joined the Marine Corps.&quot; I feel a responsibility to take part in the national defense in some way. For whatever short amount of time or whatever miniscule part of it that I am, I would like to do my part, and I feel the Marine Corps is the best way for me to do it. I am also joining for the experience in self-growth that comes with being a Marine. The experiences are priceless, and many cannot be had anywhere else. I would only hope that anyone considering joining the military today for those reasons of which I am very proud of realize that they have a higher calling than serving their country: to restore faith in our system of governance, before they make themselves ready to fight and kill and die in the United States of America, knowing that they may end up dying for a lie.
I joined the Marine Corps. I shipped to boot camp June 18, 2000, and checked into my reserve unit at the end of that year after completing artillery training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and went to college at Claremont McKenna in Southern California.
And in the run-up to the war, I believed the narrative that was being put forth by this administration. I believed what Colin Powell said at the UN. And still, I believed that the war would not be in this nation&#8217;s best interest and was against it from the beginning.
But after the war, after the invasion, at the beginning of the occupation, I felt that what we were doing was cleaning up our mess and genuinely responsible foreign policy and trying to do good by the Iraqi people, so I volunteered to go with a civil affairs unit. And in the two weeks between being activated and deploying to Iraq, I learned that what we were doing in civil affairs was going to be working with the Iraqi people on schools and mosques and clinics and water projects, and to me it sounded like exactly what the President was promising that we would be doing in Iraq. And I was very excited about that. I thought that we were going to be the tip of the spear. And I had to go to Iraq myself to found out that that was not the case and that the greatest enemies of the Constitution are not to be found in the sands of Fallujah, but rather right here in Washington, D.C.
When I &mdash; on our way into Iraq, I was issued this rules of engagement card that is supposed to be the gold standard of conduct and use of force for the military in the occupation of Iraq. They couldn’t even cut the card square. But if I may, it begins with “Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself. Section one. Enemy military and paramilitary forces may be attacked, subject to the following instructions. Positive identification is required prior to engagement. PID is, quote, ‘reasonable certainty,’ unquote, that your target is a legitimate military target. If no PID , contact your next higher commander for decision. Section one, delta. Do not fire into civilian populated areas or buildings unless the hostile force is using them for hostile purposes or if necessary for your self-defense.” Section three reads, “You may detain civilians if they interfere with mission accomplishment, possess important information or if required for self-defense.” It says at the end, &quot;Remember, attack only hostile forces and military targets.&quot; And at the very end, it says, &quot;These ROE will remain in effect until your commander” &mdash; and then the rest of that sentence is actually cut off here.
And that just goes to show that not only are the rules of engagement, as they’re strictly outlined by this card, to contradict themselves and to be confusing and to put Marines in a situation where their morals, as defined by those rules, are put at odds with their survival instincts. And I think that it&#8217;s fundamentally criminal to put brave young Americans in that situation.
I was attached to Golf Company 2/1, my civil affairs team, before the siege of Fallujah, and we were called with them to support them in the blocking of the two bridges over the Euphrates River on the west side of Fallujah after four Blackwater security agents were killed and had their bodies burned and strung up on the northern bridge in April of 2004.
Shortly after arriving there &mdash; first slide, please &mdash; there was a checkpoint shooting to the west of our position where a man coming home from work at the end of the day did not see the newly emplaced Humvee, desert-colored, against the desert background, manned by Marines wearing desert-colored camouflage. And a Marine there decided that he was approaching at too fast a rate of speed and emptied into the vehicle with a .50-caliber machine gun. We later justified this by saying that there were &mdash; that hearing the vehicle burning afterwards, there were rounds cooking off from the heat, although it’s clear from this picture and from every other examination that there were no rounds in the vehicle cooking off that would have made punctures in the outer body of the vehicle. Next slide, please. The second round or the round that hit this Iraqi gentleman in his chest, hit him so hard that it broke his chair and knocked him back in his seat.
Next slide, please. The vehicle was dragged into our compound where we were sleeping, as you can see in the background where the vehicles are parked in this picture. This is a picture that I’m very ashamed of, having posed with this dead Iraqi as a trophy picture. But what felt awkward to me at the time was not that &mdash; not so much that I was taking the picture, but rather that I had not killed this man, and I was almost &mdash; I was taking a trophy of someone else&#8217;s kill. And my entire team was present for this, including a major, and numerous members of my team took similar pictures. At the first Winter Soldier investigation in 1971, one of the Vietnam veterans held up a similar photograph and said, “Don’t ever let your government do this to you. Don&#8217;t ever let your government put you in a position where this attitude towards death and this disregard for human life is acceptable or common.” And yet, we are still doing this to service members every day, as long as the occupation continues.
Next slide, please. At one point during the siege of Fallujah, it was decided that we were going to allow women and children to leave the city. We thought this was the most magnanimous thing we could have done, and yet our rules were to let only women and children out. And so, any male over the age of fourteen or, as we were told, anyone who was old enough to be in your fighting hole was too old to get out of the city, was turned away. And so, my responsibility during this time at certain points was to go out on this bridge and turn away families. And like I said, we thought this was the most magnanimous thing we could have been doing. However, it’s clear that we’re giving these families an impossible choice, whether they could stay together with their families intact or split their families up and hope that half of them end up with something better. But all that we had to offer them was literally the mosque across the street, good luck. And what happened there can only be described as either the deliberate or careless creation of internally displaced refugees.
During the siege of Fallujah, our rules of engagement changed so often that we were often uncertain of them. And at one point, anyone who was described as a suspicious observer would be a legitimate target: anyone holding a cell phone, binoculars or, at one point, anyone out after curfew. And this led to an incident where Marines were firing at firefighters and cops silhouetted against a fire that our indirect fire had caused who were trying to help out the civilians that were being affected by that fire.
After the siege of Fallujah, my team was tasked with setting up a checkpoint at the Civil Military Operations Center at Fallujah, where we detained various personnel at snap VCPs during the summer of 2004, many of whom were harassed unnecessarily. One such person had a bag of cash in his back seat and was harassed by human intelligence officers before being released. And their abuse of him was such that they were even reprimanded by a higher officer, but they determined that there was no reason to detain him, and he was let go. If that money was not intended for the insurgency before this incident, I have to assume that it was afterwards.
I realized that we in civil affairs were a fig leaf. We were there to make the occupation look good. We even came up with a slogan to justify our existence to the infantry commanders that we had to beg to be able to get out and do our missions. And it was &quot;We care, so that you don’t have to.&quot;
If there are any questions from members of Congress as to the particulars of any incident that I have mentioned here, I would be happy to provide names of all personnel and units involved, dates and grid coordinates. I hope that my testimony has helped shed light into some of the shadows that make up our collective denial of the occupation of Iraq. As a country, we have allowed fear to overwhelm us and have failed ourselves by allowing this criminal occupation to have ever happened.
You do not have to have served to see how recent pressures on the military are making us weaker as a country. You do not have to have witnessed the occupation firsthand to see its absurdity. And you do not have to be an expert on international relations to see the disastrous effects of our foreign policy. Ignorance, propaganda and distraction have made up the last refuge of those Americans who would rather remain in denial about our current state of affairs. Now that we are facing the truth and the majority of America is at least nominally against the occupation of Iraq, what fate will we claim for our nation? For some, their silence will be their hypocrisy, and their inaction will be their complicity with the destruction of our great union.
But I have an unwavering faith in my country, and I know that the self-righting ship of the United States of America will one day regain its course, but only with the great toil, courage and sacrifice that it demands of its Winter Soldiers. I am proud to call myself one of them today.
JAMES GILLIGAN : My name is James Gilligan. I served a four-year and a two-year contract honorably for the United States Marine Corps. While on active duty, I achieved the rank of corporal and was promoted in the Individual Ready Reserve to the rank of sergeant. I was deployed in Kuwait and later in the initial assault five years ago to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 with the 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, H&amp;S Company, CEB Main, and served as a member of the Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Reconnaissance team for the Combat Engineer Battalion Main. Later in the same month of returning home, I deployed to United States Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with 3/6 Weapons Company, CAAT platoon. I was assigned to the joint operations center and later on the fence line. I personally observed Camp X-Ray from the outside and later once inside. In 2004, I was deployed with the same unit to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
I have testimony on all three deployments to be entered into the record. However, today, in a message of solidarity with IVAW , we&#8217;re only going to talk about and speak about Iraq. I am also a number of that 120 a week. I, in 2007, tried to take my life, as well. I feel deep regret and remorse for what we’ve done in Iraq and on the global war on terror. This is my testimony.
Kuwait and Iraq, 2003, the initial invasion was to be a mechanized breach, or a “mick lick” [ MCLC ]. It’s a tub of C-4 on a high-tension rope with a detonation cord inside. It fires on a rocket over a minefield and is used in counter-landmine warfare to make a lane which trucks can drive through. We practiced this maneuver twice in Kuwait and never performed it.
It was on the oral history review DSIT AE 015 conducted January 14th of 1991, an interview between Major Dennis P. Levin of the 130th Military History Detachment and Major Walter Wilson, Jr. S-3, 1st Battalion, 504th Infantry. It was quoted right away.
Major Levin: &quot;The primary focus of this interview is the training relative to the Iraqi strong point that was constructed on the Ali Range. And I am interested in what preparation you had before the training operation, and then if you could just kind of take me through the operation as it went.”
Major Wilson replied back with: “The main preparation we did, other than issuing a formal operations order, was to rehearse it twice before we actually conducted the attack. And also we had about two officer professional development classes on the Iraqi strong point and what it consists of, and how we would envision taking it down.”
This tactic was in the works prior to the invasion twelve years later. We were issued the same warning orders, and instead of breaching under fire, we breached the country twice by road, the second time by UN security car through UN &mdash; back to Kuwait and back onto the Iraqi roads. This was all due to the incompetence on the leaders of the convoy commander. I am sure, without fail, that we were the only unit in history to have ever invaded a country and invaded it all in ten minutes twice.
It was then that we drove on through the day and continued unhindered for most of the next two days, while American air power pounded the hell out of Iraqi armor and buildings with depleted uranium rounds. The amount of destruction was tremendous, and we watched once while in a traffic jam as a pair of Apaches laid rockets and gunfire into the heart of a city a few kilometers in the distance. Without a doubt, I have been in and around buildings destroyed by depleted uranium rounds, as well as vehicles, armored personnel carriers, tanks and corpses.
During the invasion, we were also exposed to severe sandstorms, which meant that we were breathing in sand for days, sand that more than likely contained depleted uranium. I went for forty-seven days without a shower in the initial invasion, and I could buy a PlayStation 2 game in a post exchange before I could even shower, because our contractors were already making bases and had a routine supply line, while we were sleeping out in the open. Almost daily, I found Iraqis who spoke English, whose questions were who we were and how long we were to be there.
Today is the Conscientious Objector Day, May 15th, and the day that honors those who choose not to fire their weapons. They do go to combat sometimes by force of their command. We were just a week before the flight to Kuwait when I saw my first sergeant chew someone out about his CO status. I heard the first sergeant say, “What if those f-blank ragheads came into your home and raped your daughter and tortured and murdered your wife?” I was shocked to hear the bravery in the young lance corporal’s voice as he told the first sergeant, “No, I don’t know what I would do. Why? Would we do that to them?”
Destroying Iraqi property was such a pleasure for some, but for me one day it was orders. I was ordered to take Lance Corporal Jerome with me as security, and I received orders via inter-squad radio to destroy a civilian’s pickup truck. I slashed as much as I could, and I kicked in the windshield for good measure. It was later with regret that I thought that this might have been this man’s livelihood.
Looting during the initial invasion was rampant. Nearly everyone had something: rugs, pens, pictures, you name it, anything you could find that would fetch a price. Later, I had to surrender to US Customs officials, military liaison, my pins with Saddam&#8217;s head on the design. They wanted them back, because all uniform items were to be confiscated for the rebuilding and reconstituting of the Iraqi army. Meanwhile, we were running over guns and blowing up weapons caches. Slides. Those that didn’t bought their souvenirs on the street, some of which were probably stolen.
That’s a picture of me as a tunnel rat in Afghanistan.
Next slide. For some members in my unit, it was the Iraqi atomic energy facility that was most profiting. It was there that I was told that members of my unit had breached a safe containing gold coins. I was not on that foot patrol, which took place deep within the compound. However, I was shown the coins later from fellow NCOs in my platoon.
When I deployed, it was with two sappy armor-protected plates, yet I was ordered to give one to a fellow Marine from 1st Combat Engineer Battalion who had not deployed with one. Such was the case for a majority of the junior NCOs and below from 1st CEB , deploying with inadequate armor. During the initial invasion, in fact, my Humvee had plastic doors.
We never found evidence of weapons of mass destruction while on patrol with the Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Warfare chief warrant officer and fellow members of my reconnaissance team.
Early May, while trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, we were surrounded by a crowd of non-hostile Iraqis. I witnessed my first sergeant for H&amp;S Company as he exited the Humvee without any backup or support. He ran down a male Iraqi child who was maybe seven to eight years old and lifted him in the air, hand choking the boy. With his pistol already drawn, he pointed into the child’s head and neck area, threatening and screaming shouts of profanity. As a result of this, the mood in the truck was dead silence until we returned to our campsite.
Thank you very much.
AMY GOODMAN : Marine Corporal James Gilligan served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. We’ll have more from the Winter Soldier on the Hill hearings in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : We return to Winter Soldier on the Hill and to war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan testifying before Congress about the horrors of war. This is California Congressmember Barbara Lee questioning former Army Sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith.
REP . BARBARA LEE : Now, I know part of the psychology of war is to dehumanize people so that the atrocities that are required &mdash; the atrocities that are committed, that those atrocities would bear minimal emotional impact on the soldier. How does this affect the mental health of those who have to do these things? And how do we need to move forward to make sure that suicide attempts don’t occur and that post-traumatic stress syndrome is minimized and that we could really help with the psychology and the psychological needs of our veterans? Because all of you talked about, and we saw and we witnessed on the slides, this dehumanization process in action, and that’s part of war. And I don’t know how they train our young men and women for this, but that’s what occurs, and so we have to figure this out and what we can do to help when you come home.
KRISTOFER GOLDSMITH : Yes, Congressman. Something that was brought up to me by a very good friend of mine sitting behind me, Mathis Chiroux, just mentioned maybe two weeks ago, and it was something I never thought about, was that every enlistee spends a week of basic training, or at least a few days, doing bayonet training. And we are putting a bayonet, a knife on the end of a rifle, and we repeatedly stab a dummy that looks like a human being and yell &quot;Kill!&quot; with every movement, yell &mdash;-
REP . BARBARA LEE : This is part of your training?
KRISTOFER GOLDSMITH : Yes, that is the basis of the military on a broad scale. That is the basis and the first step to dehumanization towards the enemy and the acceptance to kill is -&mdash; there’s a very popular thing that the drill sergeants require us to say. I remember the first time I heard it, I refused to say it, and it wasn’t because I didn’t want to be a soldier, it was because I thought it was weird. And the response to the question, “Soldiers, what makes the green grass grow?&quot; and the response is &quot;Blood, blood, blood, Drill Sergeant!&quot; So I would like to allow Geoffrey to go on how we can move past that.
GEOFFREY MILLARD : You asked in your question, Congresswoman, what can you do to move forward with veterans coming home with scars that can’t be seen by the eye, ones of mental wounds. Well, in Iraq Veterans Against the War, we didn’t wait for the VA. We started a counseling group called Homefront Battle Buddies. In the Washington, D.C. chapter, which I’m the president of, we meet every Sunday at the Washington, D.C. office, our home, to meet for our Homefront Battle Buddies. That program is expanding nationally. We in Iraq Veterans Against the War have a saying, that we’re not going to wait for politicians to end the war. We ended the war every day in what we do. We also do the same when it comes to our other goals, including taking care of veterans: we’ve started counseling groups.
But what you can do, start simply with getting more Iraq veterans into college with the GI Bill. Even myself, with an honorable discharge and nine years of service, I’m not eligible under the current GI Bill for any benefits. The GI Bill is the start, but also making sure that the Veterans Administration is fully funded, making sure that there is no waiting list for PTSD care. We have seen multiple suicides this year alone on veterans who have been waiting on a waiting list to get mental healthcare at a VA. This is inexcusable. There should never be a waiting list for any veteran, especially not one so young coming home from Iraq, when they ask for mental healthcare. These are the types of things that while we move forward in Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Congress can certainly move more funding into the VA, more funding into our veterans as they come home and out of the occupation. Thank you.
REP . MAXINE WATERS : Let me just try and focus for a moment on Fallujah. I know that there have been a lot of &mdash; a lot of confrontations and a lot of fighting in different areas. But for some reason, Fallujah loomed large at the point that we were learning about it and the images that we were seeing coming back about Fallujah. And it looked as if our military was going door-to-door, kicking down doors and shooting anything that moved. Is that a correct assumption? Could you just describe a little bit what happened in Fallujah?
ADAM KOKESH : I believe what you’re referring to was the second battle of Fallujah in November. I was there for the first battle, when the primary military action was the siege of the city, and I was there for the whole interim period in the summer. I left in September of 2004.
But what I saw was that at the Civil Military Operations Center where I worked is that we created the Fallujah Brigade and handed over security of the city to this brigade of Iraqi Security Forces. And we knew, and I as a sergeant knew and all of my Marines knew, that by June of 2004 we were essentially arming and equipping the insurgency in Fallujah by providing supplies for what we called the Fallujah Brigade. And we waited until August to disband &mdash; announce that we were disbanding the Fallujah Brigade and ask that members turn in their American-issued ID cards and uniforms and weapons, and told them that if they didn’t, they would never get another federal job. And the reason we were able to say that was because despite the handover of power happening on June 28, we were still handling all payroll for the Iraqi Security Forces, at least where I was.
And we didn’t go into the city of Fallujah for the second battle until after the presidential elections of 2004, because I believe that the President knew he could not get elected with the headline of twenty Marines dead in downtown Fallujah, which I believe is what it would have been had we gone through when we knew, at least by our thinking at the time, that we would have had to go through Fallujah. And not only did numerous Americans die unnecessarily in that battle, because as ignorant as people were to what it meant that there were eight battalions poised outside of the city of Fallujah, the insurgents knew, and they were ready for the soldiers that went in. And as it was, almost a hundred Americans lost their lives in that battle. But not only that, numerous Marines died every single day maintaining that loose cordon of Fallujah throughout the summer of 2004.
But what it’s made clear is that this administration has chosen a policy for this country that values looking good over doing right. And as soon as you choose looking good over doing right, you will fail miserably at both. It is what we are doing as a country right now. It is what our leadership is doing. And it is what the Democratic Party has done, since it took power in 2006, when it decided that it would be more concerned with looking good than doing right, in terms of the policy towards Iraq, in order to secure an advantage for the 2008 election. My apologies to members of the Democratic Party in the room, but it is clear to me that that policy of looking good over doing right has been established firmly by this administration and has poisoned not only the military culture but our entire society and political leadership, as well.
REP . MAXINE WATERS : So would you conclude that in Fallujah, when our soldiers went in, that whatever the command was, whatever the instructions or the orders were, that some of our soldiers who died there died because of a poor command, a lack of &mdash;-
ADAM KOKESH : I think the manipulations that led to the unnecessary deaths in Fallujah happened at the highest policymaking levels. There were State Department personnel present during the negotiations that created the Fallujah Brigade at my facility, and it is those manipulations of the process that led to those deaths. I don’t think even the generals who were conducting that -&mdash; those battles had any say in the timing or the actual conduct, really, of those engagements.
REP . MAXINE WATERS : Thank you. And finally, the civilians who died there who were in those houses, where it appeared that our soldiers were sent to kick down the doors and to shoot anything that was moving, can &mdash; is it reasonable to conclude that that policy was not a good policy, that people died needlessly, soldiers and civilians?
ADAM KOKESH : Well, in terms of kicking down doors, I believe you’re referring again to the second battle of Fallujah, so I’m not going to try to comment on that.
REP . MAXINE WATERS : OK, OK.
ADAM KOKESH : But the way that the siege was handled absolutely led to the unnecessary innocent deaths of civilians. And one of the things we were tasked with at our Civil Military Operations Center was paying of Silatia payments, or battle damage claims, as we called them. And we distributed a couple million dollars that way. I was interviewed by Al Jazeera, because doing something like this was historically unprecedented. But we would turn around and pay people what it would cost to rebuild their homes, had we destroyed their home by accident, so somebody coming to our facility filing a claim might get $25,000 for the home that we accidentally dropped a bomb on, and $2,500 for the son that was killed in that accident. And that just goes to show the relative value of life that Americans have or the value that Americans place on Iraqi lives based on that policy that we carried out there.
REP . KEITH ELLISON : There is this sort of assumption, this base-level assumption when you go out and talk to folks and when you talk to people around here, that if there was a precipitous or a quick withdrawal from Iraq, that it would lead to more chaos than exists today, and that you also hear, as a corollary to that, that, you know, we &mdash; that that’s why we have to somehow stay until we, quote-unquote, “win.” Could you all address that assumption squarely, that somehow we are the glue holding Iraqi society together?
LUIS MONTALVAN : Yeah, I’d like to answer that &mdash; what’s that? Yeah, I’d like to answer that, since I was a member of the Iraq Enterprise Institute, which contrived the surge and I was vehemently against. And &mdash; what did I say? I’m sorry, the American Enterprise Institute. Sometimes my brain doesn’t &mdash; the synapses don’t fire.
But, you know, there is a misconception that staying in Iraq is vital to our national security interests and that a precipitous withdrawal, as you mentioned, Congressman, will lead to further chaos both in Iraq and in the Middle East. First of all, that’s an assumption, an assumption that has been made time and time again by the highest echelon of our general officers, who, I might remind you again, have consistently lied and misrepresented the situation on the ground in Iraq for the better part of five years. That having been said, there is no doubt that a withdrawal from Iraq is going to increase bloodshed and humanitarian refugees and suffering.
The question is, ought we to be there? Ought we to continue to fund billions of dollars, of American taxpayer dollars, toward an endeavor with no clearly defined end state for an unknown period of time? It’s my belief that a withdrawal of the majority of conventional forces in Iraq will in fact force the hand, and it might not be in the type of way that we would all like &mdash; there will be violence, no doubt about it &mdash; but it will force the hand of the tribal, ethnic and sectarian leaders to sort out their matters on their own, while we should be maintaining the sovereign borders of Iraq so as to prevent Middle Eastern &mdash; to prevent the civil war in Iraq to further growing into a Middle Eastern regional war.
REP . KEITH ELLISON : Do you gentlemen agree, or &mdash;-
ADAM KOKESH : Well, from my experience, it is clear that every specter that has been raised in terms of potential consequences of a withdrawal from Iraq is worse the longer we stay there, every single one, most notably the “follow us home” argument, because the more enemies we make over there, which we are making every day, the more there will be to follow us home.
We call for the immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces. And what that means, most importantly, to me is the immediate end to the occupation -&mdash; that is to say, the forceful interference with Iraqi sovereignty, which we are doing every time we go out the gates and impose martial law through our presence. But we also advocate reparations for the Iraqi people and recognize that we do have an obligation to the country of Iraq and that a continued diplomatic presence there in order to ensure that that leads to the kind of rule of law and stability and prosperity that the Iraqi people deserve is ensured.
REP . KEITH ELLISON : What does things like Abu Ghraib and other abuses that have been described &mdash; what does that do to the average Iraqi, who may not hold any animus toward the United States or US soldiers, but after their cousin, uncle or aunt or wife has been abused or outraged &mdash; what does that do to them? And what does that do to your security?
JAMES GILLIGAN : That’s an excellent question. When you meet an Iraqi teenage male on the street, you’re not meeting your average American male. You’re meeting an Iraqi male who has experienced a conflict, an occupation, that has been going on for the past five years in his homeland, in his neighborhood, in his streets, in his schools. So when you meet these people on the streets, you’re meeting people that &mdash; I mean, they know what’s up. They know, you know, exactly what the Marine Air Wing is capable of. They know exactly what, you know, our prison systems are like. They know exactly what our responses are going to be to gunfire, mortar fire, sniper attacks, etc. And they&#8217;re doing it, and they’re doing it good. They’re doing it consistently, and they’re trying to continue this resistance, and this act of resistance is not going to end until we are actually out of that country.
ADAM KOKESH : I served &mdash; I was manning a checkpoint or running a checkpoint at the Civil Military Operations Center when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and I had to go out the next day and face crowds of Iraqi people. And for us, it was &mdash; it felt as though we had been betrayed by the policy that resulted in that scandal occurring the way it had and that that was the environment that we were facing, that we still &mdash; the new challenge that I had that day was to go out and still convince the Iraqi people that we were there to help them.
AMY GOODMAN : Former Sergeant Adam Kokesh testifying before Congress, along with other Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at the Winter Soldier on the Hill hearings.AMYGOODMAN: War veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan came to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress and give an eyewitness account about the horrors of war. Like the Winter Soldier hearings in March, when more than 200 service members gathered for four days in Silver Spring, Maryland to give their eyewitness accounts of the injustices occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan, Winter Soldier on the Hill was designed to drive home the human cost of war and occupation — this time, to the very people in charge of doing something about it.

The name “Winter Soldier” comes from a similar event in 1971, when hundreds of Vietnam vets gathered in Detroit. The term is derived from the opening line of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet The Crisis, published in 1776. "These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman,” Paine wrote.

Well, in a packed public hearing, the soldiers testified before a panel of lawmakers from the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Today, we spend the hour with their testimony. We begin with former Marine sniper, Sergio Kochergin, giving a firsthand, behind-the-scenes account of the initial days of the US invasion of Iraq.

SERGIOKOCHERGIN: As we cleared all the buildings and moved into the city, and we finally had a time to take a little break, we found a lot of left-behind vehicles, from pickup trucks all the way to luxury Toyota Avalons with leather and sunroofs, which we used for perimeter patrolling. The pickup trucks and the other vehicles were used for the car derby. We would either ram into each other or just ram into the walls, while Iraqi people watched us and were asking for vehicles. We knew they were going to loot the cars, so we just destroyed them, so that the people would not have a chance to take them, except for the scraps.

We also were exposed to a lot of dead Iraqi citizens, either enemy combatants or innocent civilians who were killed by initial air strikes or invasion. At one point, after approaching dead bodies of about four people, we began to take pictures and tried to move and flip them over to try and identify them as civilians or enemy combatants. A few days later, a family of the killed came by and asked if we found anyone who was killed nearby. Me and another Marine led the family to the dead corpses, and they were identified as their sons and uncles and nephews of the family. It was very hard to see the pain in the people’s eyes from their loss. They began to cry and point at us and at the sky and telling us that the planes killed them, and it was our fault also. But we tried to explain to them that it wasn’t us.

Imam Ali Mosque in al-Najaf, Iraq, an influential Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, was killed with another 122 innocent people on August 30th of 2003. A few of our Marines went to the hospital to provide security for all the relatives that were trying to contact their families. When they came back, they said they have never seen so much blood before. They said that they couldn’t even see the ground, so much blood and body parts were everywhere. The suicide bombing was placed by al-Hakim’s political and religious opponent, al-Sadr. Unknown number of attacks have been organized by al-Sadr’s militia against innocent people of Iraq and against the occupying forces.

One other responsibility we had in al-Najaf was to guard an ammunition supply point about thirty miles northeast from our base. Our job consisted of patrolling ASB, and when we came into contact with Iraqis stealing stuff, we would take a physical action and to make sure they would never come back. We would shoot their tires out or shoot their windows, putting them on their knees like we’re about to execute them and just shoot in the air and laugh and yell at them and tell them that the next time will be worse. Our orders directly from command was to roughen up all the guys up. They would always tell us that everybody is an enemy and that we can’t trust them and the only way to keep them in place is to put as much fear as possible and to let them know that we’re not playing around. During the deployment in al-Najaf, nothing was fixed or intended on being fixed at all, except keeping the city in the occupied hands and instill the fear into the people at every chance we got.

My second deployment was in the city of Husaybah in Al Anbar province in Al Qaim region on the Syrian border. First thing I want to talk about is the drop weapons. Drop weapons are the weapons that are given to us by our chain of command in case we kill somebody without any weapons, and so that we would not get into trouble. We would carry an AK-47, and if the person that was shot did not have the weapon, an AK-47 would be placed at his corpse, and when the unit would come back to the base, they would turn it in to identify the shot man as the enemy combatant. The weapons could not come from anywhere else but the higher chain of command, because after the raid, all weapons were turned in into the armory and should have been recorded.

Two months into deployment, our rules of engagement changed to a personnel with having a bag and a shovel at the intersection or on the roads, that they were suspicious. This gave us a bigger window on who we can engage. Looking at the situation, this point of view, a lot of enemy combatants that we shot were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were tired, mad, angry, and we just wanted to go home and stop this killing of our brothers. One of our intelligence officers told us that they received a call from one of the sources in the city telling them that there are fliers posted all over the town that says that there are unknown snipers in the city, they kill the insurgents and the civilians. We did not take into consideration that the innocent people are being killed by us, because every time we sent the pictures to the command post through the interlink system, we would receive an approval to kill people with shovels and the bags.

Now, I know that it wasn’t right to do that, but when you trust those who act like they care for you, you listen to them and follow their orders, because you don’t want to let your friends down. “What if?” was used as a propaganda and a way to relieve our minds from the actions we have partaken in and make it easier on us.

Another thing I want to touch on is, problems with equipment are another big problem. Where is all the money going that is given to the military? During my first deployment, I had a Vietnam-era flak jacket without a plate. My M-16 was made back in the late ’70s. We did not have enough night-vision goggles for everyone. While Marines are patrolling in the Hummers every day and get blown up, because the only protection they have are the flak blankets hanging from the doors, while generals and colonels and other high-ranking officers that leave a base once in awhile have brand new, fully armored Hummers that are always spotless clean sitting on the base, while other Hummers are bleeding with our brothers’, sons’, daughters’, sisters’ blood every day.

When we all come back from Iraq and we seek help from our command, they call us “weak” and “cowards.” The lines for a psychologist is almost a year long, and the only thing that can help us is the alcohol and the prescription pills they’re giving out to us like candy to keep us down, because it seems like doctors don’t want to do their job and they just don’t care. Use of drugs amongst the military units is critical. We lost numerous numbers of people from failing drug tests. They either want to get out, or they’re just so messed up, and the only one thing that can help them to escape is the drugs.

The last thing I want to tell you is about a roommate who we shared a bathroom with, a Marine who was on the suicide watch for about few months on and off. The last three weeks before we were deployed, he was constantly on watch. A week before family day, when the family comes in and says goodbye to their Marines before we deploy, he was released from the watch, so that he would not say anything to his parents, and he did not say anything to them. About a month into deployment, he blew his brains out in the shower stall. Actions like that show the poor judgment of our command just to have numbers for the troops and just to keep their own skins safe. The Marine should have never gone to Iraq in the first place, and nobody was held responsible for his death. If there is no care for your own Marines, what care do they have for the people of Iraq when they give the orders?

I want to thank you for your time, and I believe that you will make a right decision and will help us to stop this inhumane treatment of Iraqi people and the troops and stop occupation of Iraq and help us to bring troops home. Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: Former Marine sniper, Sergio Kochergin. Next up is former Army Captain Luis Montalvan. He worked extensively for General David Petraeus.

LUISMONTALVAN: I wrote countless memoranda to my superiors requesting more resources and personnel, but they went unanswered. In Iraq, I witnessed many disturbing things. I witnessed waterboarding. I was given unlawful orders by superiors to not offer humanitarian assistance to refugees caught between Syrian and Iraqi borders. I disobeyed those orders. I witnessed and participated in countless massive operations led by American commanders whose metrics for success were numbers of detainees apprehended without regard to the real effects: tribal, ethnic, sectarian strife conducted by American taxpayer-uniformed and -equipped militias the US military calls Iraqi Security Forces.

Most reprehensible was that we have never had close to the amount of troops we needed in Iraq. Yet from 2003 until today, General Sanchez, Casey and Petraeus, among others, did not heed the requests of their subordinate officers for more resources and more troops. Instead, they perpetually painted a rosy picture of the situation to the country, while the country fell into civil war. These generals consistently overstated the strength and number of Iraqi Security Forces to Congress and still do. The misrepresentation of the facts should be grounds for courts-martial and criminal indictments.

I lost many friends in Iraq, American and Iraqi. Many Iraqi friends continue to suffer as refugees inside and outside of Iraq. As a matter of fact, an Iraqi friend, whom I consider a brother, named Ali, is meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Jordan today to process his application for asylum under the United States Refugee Admissions Program. Recently, Ali contacted me through my website asking for help. As a result, a few of my comrades in the US Army sent him letters of support, since he frequently risked his life to help us in 2003 and 2004. I pray that Ali and many others are quickly helped.

I wish to focus this letter, Ted, on things we struggled — we both struggled with enormously: negligence, dereliction of duty and corruption. You believe Generals Joseph Fil and David Petraeus were negligent and committed dereliction of duty. So do I. In the note you addressed to Generals Petraeus and Fil found by your body that the Army says is your, quote, “suicide note,” you stated, quote, “You are only interested in your careers and provide no support to your staff, no mission support, and you don’t care. I cannot support a mission that leads to corruption, human rights abuses and liars. I am sullied no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves.” The members of your family believe this note is a part of a journal entry that was removed and placed near your body. Moreover, they told me that they have not received your journal, among other personal effects.

While at the port of entry at Al Waleed in 2003, among the many memoranda I submitted to my superiors was a report expressing the need for an automated tracking system for immigration and emigration. General Ricardo Sanchez and Paul Bremer sent a delegation to Al Waleed to assess the port of entry for installation of the Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System, known as the PISCES, to provide tracking of transnational movement of immigration and emigration. When the team departed, they informed me that the facilities would support installation of the PISCES. By the time my unit, the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, left in March 2004, PISCES had not been emplaced.

In 2005, I returned to Iraq for a second tour. Assigned as the regimental Iraqi Security Forces coordinator working for Colonel H.R. McMaster, who has today been slotted for general, among my duties was to oversee the development and security of the northern half of the secured — of the Syrian-Iraqi border at the port of entry at Rabia. On June 2005, Commander Guy Vilardi, working for Multi-National Corps-Iraq, informed me that CPATT, a sub-entity, had possessed a dozen PISCES in containers located in Baghdad. He also informed me that they would install the systems in the near future.

Upon return to western Nineveh province, I informed my superiors, including Colonel McMaster. In August 2005, General Joseph Fil, commander of CPATT, visited Rabiya and briefed us — so that we could brief him on the status of the Syrian-Iraqi Border. We briefed General Fil, who scoffed at the notion of the installation of the PISCES system and stated that the system was no good, and we don’t have them anyhow. I informed General Fil of my conversation with Commander Vilardi, to which General Fil replied, “That’s not true, and the PISCES is no good anyhow.” In January of 2006, shortly before departure from my second tour, Colonel Carl Lammers of the United States Marine Corps Reserve, sent an email on a secure network indicating that, in fact, the PISCES systems were in containers in Baghdad. I was outraged. As of March 2006, when the 3rd ACR departed western Nineveh province, no PISCES or equivalent tracking system had been installed in the Rabiya POE.

From 2007 — from 2003 to 2007, no computer systems for tracking immigration or emigration installed — were installed along the Syrian-Iraqi border. This surely contributed to the instability of Iraq. Foreign fighters and criminals were free to move transnationally with little fear of apprehension. It is probable that significant numbers of Americans and Iraqis were wounded and killed as a result of this.

My — I see that I have one minute left, so I’ll skip down to one more important point. I witnessed contractual corruption on the point of Lee Dynamics International. I have written testimony, notes from Brigadier General — then-Brigadier General Bergner, on page four, elucidating the fact that General Petraeus and General Fil had no systems of accountability for thousands of weapons and no standard operating procedures for the procurement, stowage and dissemination of that equipment.

And lastly, I would end that, you know, for the past year and a half, myself and a number of fellow veterans of Iraq have co-authored pieces in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, among a number of other media outlets. And we have beaten our drum to try to raise the issue of the dereliction of duty committed by a number of generals who have been promoted and promoted again and continue to perpetuate the lies and paint a rosy picture of the situation of Iraq.

VINCENTEMANUELE: My name is Vincent J.R. Emanuele. I am a resident of Indiana, and I served with the United States Marine Corps from September 2002 through January of 2006 with the 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, Alpha Company, 3rd Platoon as a rifleman and a squad automatic machine gunner. I was deployed to Iraq in August of 2004, where I spent my time in Iraq as a rifleman in 3rd Squad, 1st Team, 3rd Platoon. Our area of operation was a small border town a mile south of the Euphrates and fifteen miles east of Syria called Al Qaim, Iraq.

The issues I will be discussing today include rules of the engagement, or the breakdown thereof, the death of innocents, the destruction of civilian property, the abuse of prisoners, and the mishandling of the dead, all of which took place during the duration of our tour in Iraq. These stories are not mine alone. These are our stories, the stories of 3rd Platoon. I had the chance — I had the chance to speak with several members from my platoon, and these are the events they and I felt were pertinent to discuss with you today.

An act that took place quite often in Iraq was that of taking pop shots at cars that drove by. This was quite easy for most Marines to get away with, because our rules of engagement stated that the town of Al Qaim had already been forewarned and knew to pull their cars to a complete stop when approaching a United States convoy. Our rules of engagement stated that we should first fire warning shots into the ground in front of the car, then the engine block, and then the driver and passengers. Most of the time, however, the shots made their way straight to those very individuals in the car. That is if the car was even moving in the first place. Many times, cars that had actually pulled off to the side of the road were also shot at. Of course, the consequences of such actions posed a huge problem for those of us who patrolled the streets every day. This was not the best way to become friendlier with an already very hostile local population. This was not an isolated incident and took place for most of my eight-month deployment.

In one particular instance, we were sent on a mission to blow up a bridge that was being used to transport weapons across the Euphrates. During this mission, we were ambushed and were forced to return fire in order to make our way out of the city. There are several problems with instances such as these. First, it was very difficult, if not impossible, to clearly identify hostile targets. This resulted in our unit firing into the town with little or no identification of these hostile targets. Because of inadequate intelligence and lack of personnel or competent leadership, our platoon lost a good Marine that day, and I lost my best friend.

The retrans site, otherwise known as a retransmission site, was a communications post set up on a plateau overlooking the town of Al Qaim. This communications site was there to provide communications between the main base at the railroad station where we were stationed and an outpost in Husaybah, Iraq, where Bravo Company’s area of operations took place. We would encounter mortar fire on a daily basis. Most of the time, we would return this fire with mortar fire of our own. Some of the time, the counter-battery would call in a specific location for us to exchange fire. On occasion, when the counter-battery could not call in a specific location, our unit would fire upon the town anyway, sometimes in the hills off to the west of the town where we thought the mortar fire was coming from and other times straight into the town of Al Qaim itself, onto buildings, houses and businesses. Because of the lack of personnel at the retrans site, very rarely, if ever, did we conduct a battle damage assessment report to report civilian deaths and destruction. So almost all the time these incidents went unreported and not investigated. This was not an isolated incident, as well.

Another mission our platoon was tasked to take on was that of transporting prisoners from our detention facility on base back to the desert. The reason I say the desert and not their town is because that is exactly where we would drop them off, in the middle of nowhere. Now, most of these men had obviously been deemed innocent, or else they would have been moved to a more permanent detention facility and not released back into the local population. Our unit engaged in punching, kicking, butt stroking or generally harassing and abusing these very prisoners until the point at which our unit would be take them in the middle of the desert, miles from their respective homes, and at times throw them out of the back of our Humvees, all the while continually punching, kicking and at times even throwing softball-sized rocks at their backs as they ran away. This, once again, was not an isolated incident.

Possibly the most disturbing of what took place in Iraq was the mishandling of the dead. On several occasions, our convoy came across bodies that had been decapitated and were lying on the road, sometimes for weeks. When encountering these bodies, standard procedure was to run over the corpses, sometimes even stopping and taking pictures, which was also a standard practice when encountering the dead in Iraq — this, along with neglecting to account for many of those who were killed or wounded. On one specific occasion, after I had personally shot a man attempting to flee while planting a roadside bomb, we drug his body out of the ditch he was laying in, and we subsequently left that body — slide please — we subsequently left that body to rot in the field, where we saw this man up to a week later.

These are just a few of the disturbing and unacceptable stories I could share with you from my time in Iraq. Others would include continually dehumanizing Iraqis by referring to them as “hajis” or “sand niggers.” Even the racist and sexist nature that exists within the military itself, which was obviously — overtly obvious on a daily basis. I could also tell story upon story of families being destroyed as a result of an occupation that unfortunately should have never taken place. Several members of my platoon — several members of my platoon went through divorces and/or separations, many of the time with children involved.

I could also testify to the overwhelming majority of those I served with who did not think dying in Iraq was honorable or acceptable, nor did they enjoy or want to go back to Iraq a second or third time. Unfortunately, because of personal circumstances, whether they be financial or family issues, many indeed were deployed up to three times during their four-year enlistment. In fact, many, including myself, at times did not have intention of helping the Iraqis. Because of the hostile intent, as well as the loss of lives close to us, our best friends, our unit had a general disdain and distaste for Iraqis and their country. Further, our unit, for the most part, did not trust our command and had a general mistrust and distaste of this occupation from its inception onward.

I could also speak to the personal attacks veterans, including myself and many others, had to encounter once we were willing to be treated for PTSD within our unit. The idea of being a real Marine that does not complain when coming back home and who sucks it up and just does the job that we were tasked to do, this mentality resulted in many of the Marines I served with, including myself, turning to drugs and alcohol to cope with the horrors of this bloody occupation.

AMYGOODMAN: Marine Corps rifleman Vincent Emanuele testifying before Congress. We’ll be back with more from Winter Soldier on the Hill in a minute.

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AMYGOODMAN: We return now to Winter Soldier on the Hill and to war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan testifying before Congress about the horrors of war.

ADAMKOKESH: I think my background can best be summarized by a form that I filled out 9 June, 1999 at the military entrance processing station after enlisting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, entitled “Why I Joined the Marine Corps." I feel a responsibility to take part in the national defense in some way. For whatever short amount of time or whatever miniscule part of it that I am, I would like to do my part, and I feel the Marine Corps is the best way for me to do it. I am also joining for the experience in self-growth that comes with being a Marine. The experiences are priceless, and many cannot be had anywhere else. I would only hope that anyone considering joining the military today for those reasons of which I am very proud of realize that they have a higher calling than serving their country: to restore faith in our system of governance, before they make themselves ready to fight and kill and die in the United States of America, knowing that they may end up dying for a lie.

I joined the Marine Corps. I shipped to boot camp June 18, 2000, and checked into my reserve unit at the end of that year after completing artillery training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and went to college at Claremont McKenna in Southern California.

And in the run-up to the war, I believed the narrative that was being put forth by this administration. I believed what Colin Powell said at the UN. And still, I believed that the war would not be in this nation’s best interest and was against it from the beginning.

But after the war, after the invasion, at the beginning of the occupation, I felt that what we were doing was cleaning up our mess and genuinely responsible foreign policy and trying to do good by the Iraqi people, so I volunteered to go with a civil affairs unit. And in the two weeks between being activated and deploying to Iraq, I learned that what we were doing in civil affairs was going to be working with the Iraqi people on schools and mosques and clinics and water projects, and to me it sounded like exactly what the President was promising that we would be doing in Iraq. And I was very excited about that. I thought that we were going to be the tip of the spear. And I had to go to Iraq myself to found out that that was not the case and that the greatest enemies of the Constitution are not to be found in the sands of Fallujah, but rather right here in Washington, D.C.

When I — on our way into Iraq, I was issued this rules of engagement card that is supposed to be the gold standard of conduct and use of force for the military in the occupation of Iraq. They couldn’t even cut the card square. But if I may, it begins with “Nothing on this card prevents you from using deadly force to defend yourself. Section one. Enemy military and paramilitary forces may be attacked, subject to the following instructions. Positive identification is required prior to engagement. PID is, quote, ‘reasonable certainty,’ unquote, that your target is a legitimate military target. If no PID, contact your next higher commander for decision. Section one, delta. Do not fire into civilian populated areas or buildings unless the hostile force is using them for hostile purposes or if necessary for your self-defense.” Section three reads, “You may detain civilians if they interfere with mission accomplishment, possess important information or if required for self-defense.” It says at the end, "Remember, attack only hostile forces and military targets." And at the very end, it says, "These ROE will remain in effect until your commander” — and then the rest of that sentence is actually cut off here.

And that just goes to show that not only are the rules of engagement, as they’re strictly outlined by this card, to contradict themselves and to be confusing and to put Marines in a situation where their morals, as defined by those rules, are put at odds with their survival instincts. And I think that it’s fundamentally criminal to put brave young Americans in that situation.

I was attached to Golf Company 2/1, my civil affairs team, before the siege of Fallujah, and we were called with them to support them in the blocking of the two bridges over the Euphrates River on the west side of Fallujah after four Blackwater security agents were killed and had their bodies burned and strung up on the northern bridge in April of 2004.

Shortly after arriving there — first slide, please — there was a checkpoint shooting to the west of our position where a man coming home from work at the end of the day did not see the newly emplaced Humvee, desert-colored, against the desert background, manned by Marines wearing desert-colored camouflage. And a Marine there decided that he was approaching at too fast a rate of speed and emptied into the vehicle with a .50-caliber machine gun. We later justified this by saying that there were — that hearing the vehicle burning afterwards, there were rounds cooking off from the heat, although it’s clear from this picture and from every other examination that there were no rounds in the vehicle cooking off that would have made punctures in the outer body of the vehicle. Next slide, please. The second round or the round that hit this Iraqi gentleman in his chest, hit him so hard that it broke his chair and knocked him back in his seat.

Next slide, please. The vehicle was dragged into our compound where we were sleeping, as you can see in the background where the vehicles are parked in this picture. This is a picture that I’m very ashamed of, having posed with this dead Iraqi as a trophy picture. But what felt awkward to me at the time was not that — not so much that I was taking the picture, but rather that I had not killed this man, and I was almost — I was taking a trophy of someone else’s kill. And my entire team was present for this, including a major, and numerous members of my team took similar pictures. At the first Winter Soldier investigation in 1971, one of the Vietnam veterans held up a similar photograph and said, “Don’t ever let your government do this to you. Don’t ever let your government put you in a position where this attitude towards death and this disregard for human life is acceptable or common.” And yet, we are still doing this to service members every day, as long as the occupation continues.

Next slide, please. At one point during the siege of Fallujah, it was decided that we were going to allow women and children to leave the city. We thought this was the most magnanimous thing we could have done, and yet our rules were to let only women and children out. And so, any male over the age of fourteen or, as we were told, anyone who was old enough to be in your fighting hole was too old to get out of the city, was turned away. And so, my responsibility during this time at certain points was to go out on this bridge and turn away families. And like I said, we thought this was the most magnanimous thing we could have been doing. However, it’s clear that we’re giving these families an impossible choice, whether they could stay together with their families intact or split their families up and hope that half of them end up with something better. But all that we had to offer them was literally the mosque across the street, good luck. And what happened there can only be described as either the deliberate or careless creation of internally displaced refugees.

During the siege of Fallujah, our rules of engagement changed so often that we were often uncertain of them. And at one point, anyone who was described as a suspicious observer would be a legitimate target: anyone holding a cell phone, binoculars or, at one point, anyone out after curfew. And this led to an incident where Marines were firing at firefighters and cops silhouetted against a fire that our indirect fire had caused who were trying to help out the civilians that were being affected by that fire.

After the siege of Fallujah, my team was tasked with setting up a checkpoint at the Civil Military Operations Center at Fallujah, where we detained various personnel at snap VCPs during the summer of 2004, many of whom were harassed unnecessarily. One such person had a bag of cash in his back seat and was harassed by human intelligence officers before being released. And their abuse of him was such that they were even reprimanded by a higher officer, but they determined that there was no reason to detain him, and he was let go. If that money was not intended for the insurgency before this incident, I have to assume that it was afterwards.

I realized that we in civil affairs were a fig leaf. We were there to make the occupation look good. We even came up with a slogan to justify our existence to the infantry commanders that we had to beg to be able to get out and do our missions. And it was "We care, so that you don’t have to."

If there are any questions from members of Congress as to the particulars of any incident that I have mentioned here, I would be happy to provide names of all personnel and units involved, dates and grid coordinates. I hope that my testimony has helped shed light into some of the shadows that make up our collective denial of the occupation of Iraq. As a country, we have allowed fear to overwhelm us and have failed ourselves by allowing this criminal occupation to have ever happened.

You do not have to have served to see how recent pressures on the military are making us weaker as a country. You do not have to have witnessed the occupation firsthand to see its absurdity. And you do not have to be an expert on international relations to see the disastrous effects of our foreign policy. Ignorance, propaganda and distraction have made up the last refuge of those Americans who would rather remain in denial about our current state of affairs. Now that we are facing the truth and the majority of America is at least nominally against the occupation of Iraq, what fate will we claim for our nation? For some, their silence will be their hypocrisy, and their inaction will be their complicity with the destruction of our great union.

But I have an unwavering faith in my country, and I know that the self-righting ship of the United States of America will one day regain its course, but only with the great toil, courage and sacrifice that it demands of its Winter Soldiers. I am proud to call myself one of them today.

JAMESGILLIGAN: My name is James Gilligan. I served a four-year and a two-year contract honorably for the United States Marine Corps. While on active duty, I achieved the rank of corporal and was promoted in the Individual Ready Reserve to the rank of sergeant. I was deployed in Kuwait and later in the initial assault five years ago to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 with the 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, H&S Company, CEB Main, and served as a member of the Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Reconnaissance team for the Combat Engineer Battalion Main. Later in the same month of returning home, I deployed to United States Naval Base, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with 3/6 Weapons Company, CAAT platoon. I was assigned to the joint operations center and later on the fence line. I personally observed Camp X-Ray from the outside and later once inside. In 2004, I was deployed with the same unit to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

I have testimony on all three deployments to be entered into the record. However, today, in a message of solidarity with IVAW, we’re only going to talk about and speak about Iraq. I am also a number of that 120 a week. I, in 2007, tried to take my life, as well. I feel deep regret and remorse for what we’ve done in Iraq and on the global war on terror. This is my testimony.

Kuwait and Iraq, 2003, the initial invasion was to be a mechanized breach, or a “mick lick” [MCLC]. It’s a tub of C-4 on a high-tension rope with a detonation cord inside. It fires on a rocket over a minefield and is used in counter-landmine warfare to make a lane which trucks can drive through. We practiced this maneuver twice in Kuwait and never performed it.

It was on the oral history review DSIT AE 015 conducted January 14th of 1991, an interview between Major Dennis P. Levin of the 130th Military History Detachment and Major Walter Wilson, Jr. S-3, 1st Battalion, 504th Infantry. It was quoted right away.

Major Levin: "The primary focus of this interview is the training relative to the Iraqi strong point that was constructed on the Ali Range. And I am interested in what preparation you had before the training operation, and then if you could just kind of take me through the operation as it went.”

Major Wilson replied back with: “The main preparation we did, other than issuing a formal operations order, was to rehearse it twice before we actually conducted the attack. And also we had about two officer professional development classes on the Iraqi strong point and what it consists of, and how we would envision taking it down.”

This tactic was in the works prior to the invasion twelve years later. We were issued the same warning orders, and instead of breaching under fire, we breached the country twice by road, the second time by UN security car through UN — back to Kuwait and back onto the Iraqi roads. This was all due to the incompetence on the leaders of the convoy commander. I am sure, without fail, that we were the only unit in history to have ever invaded a country and invaded it all in ten minutes twice.

It was then that we drove on through the day and continued unhindered for most of the next two days, while American air power pounded the hell out of Iraqi armor and buildings with depleted uranium rounds. The amount of destruction was tremendous, and we watched once while in a traffic jam as a pair of Apaches laid rockets and gunfire into the heart of a city a few kilometers in the distance. Without a doubt, I have been in and around buildings destroyed by depleted uranium rounds, as well as vehicles, armored personnel carriers, tanks and corpses.

During the invasion, we were also exposed to severe sandstorms, which meant that we were breathing in sand for days, sand that more than likely contained depleted uranium. I went for forty-seven days without a shower in the initial invasion, and I could buy a PlayStation 2 game in a post exchange before I could even shower, because our contractors were already making bases and had a routine supply line, while we were sleeping out in the open. Almost daily, I found Iraqis who spoke English, whose questions were who we were and how long we were to be there.

Today is the Conscientious Objector Day, May 15th, and the day that honors those who choose not to fire their weapons. They do go to combat sometimes by force of their command. We were just a week before the flight to Kuwait when I saw my first sergeant chew someone out about his CO status. I heard the first sergeant say, “What if those f-blank ragheads came into your home and raped your daughter and tortured and murdered your wife?” I was shocked to hear the bravery in the young lance corporal’s voice as he told the first sergeant, “No, I don’t know what I would do. Why? Would we do that to them?”

Destroying Iraqi property was such a pleasure for some, but for me one day it was orders. I was ordered to take Lance Corporal Jerome with me as security, and I received orders via inter-squad radio to destroy a civilian’s pickup truck. I slashed as much as I could, and I kicked in the windshield for good measure. It was later with regret that I thought that this might have been this man’s livelihood.

Looting during the initial invasion was rampant. Nearly everyone had something: rugs, pens, pictures, you name it, anything you could find that would fetch a price. Later, I had to surrender to US Customs officials, military liaison, my pins with Saddam’s head on the design. They wanted them back, because all uniform items were to be confiscated for the rebuilding and reconstituting of the Iraqi army. Meanwhile, we were running over guns and blowing up weapons caches. Slides. Those that didn’t bought their souvenirs on the street, some of which were probably stolen.

That’s a picture of me as a tunnel rat in Afghanistan.

Next slide. For some members in my unit, it was the Iraqi atomic energy facility that was most profiting. It was there that I was told that members of my unit had breached a safe containing gold coins. I was not on that foot patrol, which took place deep within the compound. However, I was shown the coins later from fellow NCOs in my platoon.

When I deployed, it was with two sappy armor-protected plates, yet I was ordered to give one to a fellow Marine from 1st Combat Engineer Battalion who had not deployed with one. Such was the case for a majority of the junior NCOs and below from 1st CEB, deploying with inadequate armor. During the initial invasion, in fact, my Humvee had plastic doors.

We never found evidence of weapons of mass destruction while on patrol with the Nuclear-Biological-Chemical Warfare chief warrant officer and fellow members of my reconnaissance team.

Early May, while trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, we were surrounded by a crowd of non-hostile Iraqis. I witnessed my first sergeant for H&S Company as he exited the Humvee without any backup or support. He ran down a male Iraqi child who was maybe seven to eight years old and lifted him in the air, hand choking the boy. With his pistol already drawn, he pointed into the child’s head and neck area, threatening and screaming shouts of profanity. As a result of this, the mood in the truck was dead silence until we returned to our campsite.

Thank you very much.

AMYGOODMAN: Marine Corporal James Gilligan served in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. We’ll have more from the Winter Soldier on the Hill hearings in a minute.

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AMYGOODMAN: We return to Winter Soldier on the Hill and to war veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan testifying before Congress about the horrors of war. This is California Congressmember Barbara Lee questioning former Army Sergeant Kristofer Goldsmith.

REP. BARBARALEE: Now, I know part of the psychology of war is to dehumanize people so that the atrocities that are required — the atrocities that are committed, that those atrocities would bear minimal emotional impact on the soldier. How does this affect the mental health of those who have to do these things? And how do we need to move forward to make sure that suicide attempts don’t occur and that post-traumatic stress syndrome is minimized and that we could really help with the psychology and the psychological needs of our veterans? Because all of you talked about, and we saw and we witnessed on the slides, this dehumanization process in action, and that’s part of war. And I don’t know how they train our young men and women for this, but that’s what occurs, and so we have to figure this out and what we can do to help when you come home.

KRISTOFERGOLDSMITH: Yes, Congressman. Something that was brought up to me by a very good friend of mine sitting behind me, Mathis Chiroux, just mentioned maybe two weeks ago, and it was something I never thought about, was that every enlistee spends a week of basic training, or at least a few days, doing bayonet training. And we are putting a bayonet, a knife on the end of a rifle, and we repeatedly stab a dummy that looks like a human being and yell "Kill!" with every movement, yell —-

REP. BARBARALEE: This is part of your training?

KRISTOFERGOLDSMITH: Yes, that is the basis of the military on a broad scale. That is the basis and the first step to dehumanization towards the enemy and the acceptance to kill is -— there’s a very popular thing that the drill sergeants require us to say. I remember the first time I heard it, I refused to say it, and it wasn’t because I didn’t want to be a soldier, it was because I thought it was weird. And the response to the question, “Soldiers, what makes the green grass grow?" and the response is "Blood, blood, blood, Drill Sergeant!" So I would like to allow Geoffrey to go on how we can move past that.

GEOFFREYMILLARD: You asked in your question, Congresswoman, what can you do to move forward with veterans coming home with scars that can’t be seen by the eye, ones of mental wounds. Well, in Iraq Veterans Against the War, we didn’t wait for the VA. We started a counseling group called Homefront Battle Buddies. In the Washington, D.C. chapter, which I’m the president of, we meet every Sunday at the Washington, D.C. office, our home, to meet for our Homefront Battle Buddies. That program is expanding nationally. We in Iraq Veterans Against the War have a saying, that we’re not going to wait for politicians to end the war. We ended the war every day in what we do. We also do the same when it comes to our other goals, including taking care of veterans: we’ve started counseling groups.

But what you can do, start simply with getting more Iraq veterans into college with the GI Bill. Even myself, with an honorable discharge and nine years of service, I’m not eligible under the current GI Bill for any benefits. The GI Bill is the start, but also making sure that the Veterans Administration is fully funded, making sure that there is no waiting list for PTSD care. We have seen multiple suicides this year alone on veterans who have been waiting on a waiting list to get mental healthcare at a VA. This is inexcusable. There should never be a waiting list for any veteran, especially not one so young coming home from Iraq, when they ask for mental healthcare. These are the types of things that while we move forward in Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Congress can certainly move more funding into the VA, more funding into our veterans as they come home and out of the occupation. Thank you.

REP. MAXINEWATERS: Let me just try and focus for a moment on Fallujah. I know that there have been a lot of — a lot of confrontations and a lot of fighting in different areas. But for some reason, Fallujah loomed large at the point that we were learning about it and the images that we were seeing coming back about Fallujah. And it looked as if our military was going door-to-door, kicking down doors and shooting anything that moved. Is that a correct assumption? Could you just describe a little bit what happened in Fallujah?

ADAMKOKESH: I believe what you’re referring to was the second battle of Fallujah in November. I was there for the first battle, when the primary military action was the siege of the city, and I was there for the whole interim period in the summer. I left in September of 2004.

But what I saw was that at the Civil Military Operations Center where I worked is that we created the Fallujah Brigade and handed over security of the city to this brigade of Iraqi Security Forces. And we knew, and I as a sergeant knew and all of my Marines knew, that by June of 2004 we were essentially arming and equipping the insurgency in Fallujah by providing supplies for what we called the Fallujah Brigade. And we waited until August to disband — announce that we were disbanding the Fallujah Brigade and ask that members turn in their American-issued ID cards and uniforms and weapons, and told them that if they didn’t, they would never get another federal job. And the reason we were able to say that was because despite the handover of power happening on June 28, we were still handling all payroll for the Iraqi Security Forces, at least where I was.

And we didn’t go into the city of Fallujah for the second battle until after the presidential elections of 2004, because I believe that the President knew he could not get elected with the headline of twenty Marines dead in downtown Fallujah, which I believe is what it would have been had we gone through when we knew, at least by our thinking at the time, that we would have had to go through Fallujah. And not only did numerous Americans die unnecessarily in that battle, because as ignorant as people were to what it meant that there were eight battalions poised outside of the city of Fallujah, the insurgents knew, and they were ready for the soldiers that went in. And as it was, almost a hundred Americans lost their lives in that battle. But not only that, numerous Marines died every single day maintaining that loose cordon of Fallujah throughout the summer of 2004.

But what it’s made clear is that this administration has chosen a policy for this country that values looking good over doing right. And as soon as you choose looking good over doing right, you will fail miserably at both. It is what we are doing as a country right now. It is what our leadership is doing. And it is what the Democratic Party has done, since it took power in 2006, when it decided that it would be more concerned with looking good than doing right, in terms of the policy towards Iraq, in order to secure an advantage for the 2008 election. My apologies to members of the Democratic Party in the room, but it is clear to me that that policy of looking good over doing right has been established firmly by this administration and has poisoned not only the military culture but our entire society and political leadership, as well.

REP. MAXINEWATERS: So would you conclude that in Fallujah, when our soldiers went in, that whatever the command was, whatever the instructions or the orders were, that some of our soldiers who died there died because of a poor command, a lack of —-

ADAMKOKESH: I think the manipulations that led to the unnecessary deaths in Fallujah happened at the highest policymaking levels. There were State Department personnel present during the negotiations that created the Fallujah Brigade at my facility, and it is those manipulations of the process that led to those deaths. I don’t think even the generals who were conducting that -— those battles had any say in the timing or the actual conduct, really, of those engagements.

REP. MAXINEWATERS: Thank you. And finally, the civilians who died there who were in those houses, where it appeared that our soldiers were sent to kick down the doors and to shoot anything that was moving, can — is it reasonable to conclude that that policy was not a good policy, that people died needlessly, soldiers and civilians?

ADAMKOKESH: Well, in terms of kicking down doors, I believe you’re referring again to the second battle of Fallujah, so I’m not going to try to comment on that.

REP. MAXINEWATERS: OK, OK.

ADAMKOKESH: But the way that the siege was handled absolutely led to the unnecessary innocent deaths of civilians. And one of the things we were tasked with at our Civil Military Operations Center was paying of Silatia payments, or battle damage claims, as we called them. And we distributed a couple million dollars that way. I was interviewed by Al Jazeera, because doing something like this was historically unprecedented. But we would turn around and pay people what it would cost to rebuild their homes, had we destroyed their home by accident, so somebody coming to our facility filing a claim might get $25,000 for the home that we accidentally dropped a bomb on, and $2,500 for the son that was killed in that accident. And that just goes to show the relative value of life that Americans have or the value that Americans place on Iraqi lives based on that policy that we carried out there.

REP. KEITHELLISON: There is this sort of assumption, this base-level assumption when you go out and talk to folks and when you talk to people around here, that if there was a precipitous or a quick withdrawal from Iraq, that it would lead to more chaos than exists today, and that you also hear, as a corollary to that, that, you know, we — that that’s why we have to somehow stay until we, quote-unquote, “win.” Could you all address that assumption squarely, that somehow we are the glue holding Iraqi society together?

LUISMONTALVAN: Yeah, I’d like to answer that — what’s that? Yeah, I’d like to answer that, since I was a member of the Iraq Enterprise Institute, which contrived the surge and I was vehemently against. And — what did I say? I’m sorry, the American Enterprise Institute. Sometimes my brain doesn’t — the synapses don’t fire.

But, you know, there is a misconception that staying in Iraq is vital to our national security interests and that a precipitous withdrawal, as you mentioned, Congressman, will lead to further chaos both in Iraq and in the Middle East. First of all, that’s an assumption, an assumption that has been made time and time again by the highest echelon of our general officers, who, I might remind you again, have consistently lied and misrepresented the situation on the ground in Iraq for the better part of five years. That having been said, there is no doubt that a withdrawal from Iraq is going to increase bloodshed and humanitarian refugees and suffering.

The question is, ought we to be there? Ought we to continue to fund billions of dollars, of American taxpayer dollars, toward an endeavor with no clearly defined end state for an unknown period of time? It’s my belief that a withdrawal of the majority of conventional forces in Iraq will in fact force the hand, and it might not be in the type of way that we would all like — there will be violence, no doubt about it — but it will force the hand of the tribal, ethnic and sectarian leaders to sort out their matters on their own, while we should be maintaining the sovereign borders of Iraq so as to prevent Middle Eastern — to prevent the civil war in Iraq to further growing into a Middle Eastern regional war.

REP. KEITHELLISON: Do you gentlemen agree, or —-

ADAMKOKESH: Well, from my experience, it is clear that every specter that has been raised in terms of potential consequences of a withdrawal from Iraq is worse the longer we stay there, every single one, most notably the “follow us home” argument, because the more enemies we make over there, which we are making every day, the more there will be to follow us home.

We call for the immediate withdrawal of all occupying forces. And what that means, most importantly, to me is the immediate end to the occupation -— that is to say, the forceful interference with Iraqi sovereignty, which we are doing every time we go out the gates and impose martial law through our presence. But we also advocate reparations for the Iraqi people and recognize that we do have an obligation to the country of Iraq and that a continued diplomatic presence there in order to ensure that that leads to the kind of rule of law and stability and prosperity that the Iraqi people deserve is ensured.

REP. KEITHELLISON: What does things like Abu Ghraib and other abuses that have been described — what does that do to the average Iraqi, who may not hold any animus toward the United States or US soldiers, but after their cousin, uncle or aunt or wife has been abused or outraged — what does that do to them? And what does that do to your security?

JAMESGILLIGAN: That’s an excellent question. When you meet an Iraqi teenage male on the street, you’re not meeting your average American male. You’re meeting an Iraqi male who has experienced a conflict, an occupation, that has been going on for the past five years in his homeland, in his neighborhood, in his streets, in his schools. So when you meet these people on the streets, you’re meeting people that — I mean, they know what’s up. They know, you know, exactly what the Marine Air Wing is capable of. They know exactly what, you know, our prison systems are like. They know exactly what our responses are going to be to gunfire, mortar fire, sniper attacks, etc. And they’re doing it, and they’re doing it good. They’re doing it consistently, and they’re trying to continue this resistance, and this act of resistance is not going to end until we are actually out of that country.

ADAMKOKESH: I served — I was manning a checkpoint or running a checkpoint at the Civil Military Operations Center when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, and I had to go out the next day and face crowds of Iraqi people. And for us, it was — it felt as though we had been betrayed by the policy that resulted in that scandal occurring the way it had and that that was the environment that we were facing, that we still — the new challenge that I had that day was to go out and still convince the Iraqi people that we were there to help them.

AMYGOODMAN: Former Sergeant Adam Kokesh testifying before Congress, along with other Iraq and Afghanistan veterans at the Winter Soldier on the Hill hearings.]]>

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500Congressional Hearings Shed New Light on Government's Endorsement of Torture; Maj. Gen. Taguba Accuses Bush Administration of War Crimeshttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/19/congressional_hearings_sheds_new_light_on
tag:democracynow.org,2008-06-19:en/story/d8ef1f JUAN GONZALEZ : Retired General Antonio Taguba, who led the US Army&#8217;s investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses, has accused the Bush administration of “a systematic regime of torture” and war crimes. Taguba&#8217;s accusations appear in the preface to a new report released by Physicians for Human Rights. The report uses medical evidence to confirm first-hand accounts of eleven former prisoners who endured torture by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.
Taguba writes, “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
AMY GOODMAN : The report was published in the midst of two days of congressional hearings on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held an eight-hour hearing that exposed the role of top Bush administration officials in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques. The committee released a series of previously classified documents detailing how the Pentagon and the CIA transformed the military&#8217;s SERE resistance training program into a blueprint for interrogating terrorist suspects. Committee Chair Senator Carl Levin explained the timeline of implementing the SERE , or Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, techniques and the role of military psychologists in devising these routines.
SEN . CARL LEVIN : On October 2, 2002, a week after John Rizzo, the acting CIA general counsel, visited Gitmo, a second senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, went to Guantanamo, attended a meeting of Gitmo staff and discussed a memo proposing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques. That memo had been drafted by a psychologist and psychiatrist from Gitmo, who a couple of weeks earlier had attended that training given at Fort Bragg by instructors by the SERE school.
While the training &mdash; excuse me, while the memo remains classified, minutes from the meeting where it was discussed are not. Those minutes clearly show that the focus of the discussion was aggressive techniques for use against detainees.
When the Gitmo chief of staff suggested at the meeting that Gitmo “can’t do sleep deprivation,” Lieutenant Colonel Beaver, Gitmo’s senior lawyer, responded, “Yes, we can &mdash; with approval.” Lieutenant Beaver added that Gitmo, quote, “may need to curb the harsher operations while the International Committee of the Red Cross is around.”
Mr. Fredman, the senior CIA lawyer, suggested that it’s, quote, “very effective to identify detainee phobias and to use them” and described for the group the so-called “wet towel” technique, which we know as waterboarding. Mr. Fredman said, quote, “It can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function,” close-quote.
And Mr. Fredman presented the following disturbing perspective of our legal obligations under our anti-torture laws, saying, quote, “It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”
“If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” How on earth did we get to the point where a senior US government lawyer would say that whether or not an interrogation technique is torture is, quote, “subject to perception” and that if, quote, “the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong”? The Gitmo senior JAG officer Lieutenant Colonel Beaver’s response was: “We will need documentation to protect us.”
JUAN GONZALEZ : The Pentagon’s former general counsel William Haynes was repeatedly questioned at Tuesday&#8217;s hearing about his role in authorizing the interrogation techniques. During two hours of testimony, Haynes responded to dozens of questions by saying he could not recall or remember details about the process of approving the interrogation techniques. Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island blasted Haynes&#8217;s role in authorizing torture.
SEN . JACK REED : You said the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply, and they honestly ask, “What does apply?” And the only thing you sent them was: these techniques apply &mdash; no conditions, nothing. So don’t go around with this attitude of you’re protecting the integrity of the military. You degraded the integrity of the United States military.
JUAN GONZALEZ : A major McClatchy newspaper series investigating the detention of terrorist suspects names Haynes as one of a group of five lawyers at the White House, Pentagon and Justice Department who called themselves the “War Council” and reinterpreted US and international laws about accountability and the treatment of prisoners. Other members of the War Council included Vice President Cheney&#8217;s former legal adviser and current chief of staff, David Addington; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo; and former deputy to Gonzales, Timothy Flanigan.
Despite the new revelations of systematic prisoner abuse sanctioned at the highest level of government, White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto insisted Tuesday that the administration does not abuse detainees.
TONY FRATTO : I can tell you it’s always been the policy of this government to treat these detainees humanely and in line with the laws and our legal obligations.
REPORTER : Along those lines, another memo came out suggesting that a senior CIA lawyer, while you were debating this in 2002, said the only short test for torture is if a detainee dies or not and said, quote, “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” Does that fit into the guidelines &mdash;-
TONY FRATTO : I don&#8217;t -&mdash; I don’t know who that is or who that came from. I&#8217;m telling you that abuse of detainees has never been, is not, and will never be the policy of this government.
AMY GOODMAN : Today, we spend the hour on torture. We begin with Mark Benjamin, national correspondent for Salon.com. He covered the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday. He joins us from Washington, D.C.
Welcome, Mark, to Democracy Now!
MARK BENJAMIN : Thank you for having me.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the revelations that have come out over these two days of hearings from the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday to yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee?
MARK BENJAMIN : Yes. I think particularly the hearing in the Senate, for me &mdash; and I’ve been covering Washington for over a decade &mdash; was one of the most incredible hearings I think I’ve ever been to. And the reason why, you had a quote from General Taguba in the lead up to this discussion that it was patently clear that there was an organized effort to torture and that it was against the law, and the only question left is whether anyone will be prosecuted. I have to say &mdash; it’s sort of amazing to say this, but I think he’s right.
What became painfully clear, I think, in the Senate hearing were two things. One is that soon after 9/11 &mdash; and there was testimony and documents showing this &mdash; officials from Washington, not interrogators out there in the field, were calling &mdash; you mentioned the military SERE school &mdash; officials from Washington were calling SERE school &mdash; we’re talking about CIA officials &mdash; [no audio]
AMY GOODMAN : We have just lost that feed for a minute, but he’s back. Go ahead, Mark. Continue.
MARK BENJAMIN : OK. What the hearing showed in the Senate was that officials from Washington, from the CIA , from the Department of Defense, were calling the military SERE school, asking for how we train at SERE school, the Search, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, how we train elite soldiers at SERE school and whether those techniques could be reverse-engineered into interrogation techniques.
Now, that’s important, and the reason why it’s important is because at SERE school, what we do with the elite soldiers is we &mdash; in some cases, they go through waterboarding, they go through sensory deprivation, hooding, forced nudity, humiliation, slapping, that kind of stuff &mdash; the same things you saw at Abu Ghraib. That school is designed to train soldiers in case they are captured by an enemy who violates the Geneva Conventions. The reason why that’s important is because at that time, violating Geneva Conventions was against the law. So you have high-level officials from Washington asking about techniques that are designed to help people in case they’re tortured by somebody who violates the Geneva Conventions. So that was one thing that came out in the hearing that was just incredibly shocking.
The other thing that came out that I thought was sort of amazing was that as the Pentagon, for example, started putting together its first formal protocols of these &mdash; using these techniques to interrogate people &mdash; in other words, the first memos from Secretary Rumsfeld in late 2002 saying this is what we’re going to do to people, we’re going to do hooding, we’re going to do forced nudity, so on and so forth, sensory deprivation &mdash; before that memo was even signed, all of the branches of the military &mdash; the Marine Corps, the Navy, the Air Force and Army &mdash; all wrote memos, before that was even signed, saying this looks like a problem, because it’s against the law. And I’ve just never seen that or never heard that. And what it suggests, obviously, is that high-level &mdash; very, very high-level people in the government knew or should have known that what they were doing was against the law. It was sort of an amazing, amazing hearing.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And also, about the role of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Myers, in terms of his response to the criticism he was getting from down the ranks and how he dealt with the Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on this issue?
MARK BENJAMIN : Yeah, that was also an amazing part of the hearing. What happened was, in late 2002, while the military was preparing to formally embrace these techniques, in memos saying this is how we’re going to interrogate people at Guantanamo and elsewhere, as I said, the military services were saying, “Don’t do this. It’s a bad idea. It won’t work, and it’s against the law.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, has his own attorney, Admiral Dalton, and Admiral Dalton began a legal review, said, “Wait a minute. Let’s do a legal review. The services are having a problem,” and started a formal legal review of this process. Because of a request from Jim Haynes, who’s the Department of Defense general counsel, worked directly for Rumsfeld &mdash; Haynes went to Dalton and said, “Stop the review” &mdash; in other words, put a halt to it, muzzle the services. And what was sort of amazing, which came out in the hearing, is Richard Myers agreed and told his own lawyer, Admiral Dalton, to stop the review. And, you know, it looked pretty awful in the hearing, because you could certainly make an argument that if Richard Myers hadn’t done that, maybe this all wouldn’t have happened.
AMY GOODMAN : We’re going to go to break, then come back to this discussion. We&#8217;re also going to be joined by the head of the NYU Center for Torture Survivors, victims of torture, just come out with a remarkable report that Major General Taguba introduced, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives.” We’re also going to be talking with the editor at McClatchy newspapers about their eight-month investigation interviewing more than sixty former prisoners, prisoners of the US, and what happened to them. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : At Tuesday&#8217;s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing, former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora blasted the Bush administration’s abusive detention practices.
ALBERTO MORA : To use so-called “harsh” interrogation techniques during the war on terror was a mistake of massive proportions. It damaged and continues to damage our nation. This policy, which may be aptly a “policy of cruelty,” violated our founding values, our constitutional system and the fabric of our laws, our overarching foreign policy interests and our national security. The net effect of this policy of cruelty has been to weaken our defenses, not to strengthen them.
Before examining the damage, it may be useful to draw some basic legal distinctions. The choice of the adjectives “harsh” or “enhanced” to describe these interrogation techniques is euphemistic and misleading. The legally correct adjective is “cruel.” Many of the counter-resistance techniques authorized for use at Guantanamo in December 2002 constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that could, depending on their application, easily rise to the level of torture.
Many Americans are unaware that there is a legal distinction between cruelty and torture, cruelty being the less severe level of abuse. This has tended to obscure important elements of the interrogation debate. For example, the public may be largely unaware that the government could evasively, if truthfully, claim, and did claim, that it was not “torturing,” even as it was simultaneously applying cruelly. Yet Americans should know that there is little or no moral distinction between cruelty and torture, for cruelty can be as effective as torture in savaging human flesh and spirit and in violating human dignity. Our efforts should be focused not merely on banning torture, but on banning cruelty.
AMY GOODMAN : Former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora, blasting the Bush administration. We turn to Mark Benjamin, who is with Salon.com. The significance of Mora’s statement?
MARK BENJAMIN : I think it’s very significant, and I think we’re going to hear more and more very smart attorneys looking at the memos that came out that we were talking about from the Senate hearing, which are incredible, which show high-level Bush administration officials using techniques that were clearly, many military officials thought were, illegal, and developing them into interrogation protocol.
And I just wanted to note that Mora is a fascinating figure in this whole story. Mora is one of the people &mdash; he was general counsel of the Navy, and in late 2002, as Secretary Rumsfeld, at least on the military side, was implementing these interrogation protocols, which a lot of attorneys think are illegal, he literally was threatening Rumsfeld&#8217;s counsel Jim Haynes to rescind that order and in fact essentially threatened to go public. He succeeded in getting at least the paper pulled back. Rumsfeld did rescind it. But by that time, the memo had already been sent to Afghanistan and on to Iraq.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And what about the inability of Haynes to recall, so many of the questions he was asked about, the specifics? What was the reaction to his faulty memory?
MARK BENJAMIN : I think the lawmakers were incredulous. I don’t think they believe him. I think that they believe he was trying not to incriminate himself. A lot of the people around Haynes during that period of time remember him aggressively pursuing this agenda on behalf of his boss. And by “this agenda,” I mean taking these tactics where we train, you know, soldiers to withstand an interrogation by whoever who would violate the Geneva Conventions and turn that into our own interrogation tactics. As I mentioned before, one of the things he did, for example, was he told the military to stop reviewing this decision, because the military &mdash; as I said, the services had real problems with it, because they thought it would be ineffective and they thought it would be illegal.JUANGONZALEZ: Retired General Antonio Taguba, who led the US Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib abuses, has accused the Bush administration of “a systematic regime of torture” and war crimes. Taguba’s accusations appear in the preface to a new report released by Physicians for Human Rights. The report uses medical evidence to confirm first-hand accounts of eleven former prisoners who endured torture by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

Taguba writes, “There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

AMYGOODMAN: The report was published in the midst of two days of congressional hearings on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee held an eight-hour hearing that exposed the role of top Bush administration officials in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation techniques. The committee released a series of previously classified documents detailing how the Pentagon and the CIA transformed the military’s SERE resistance training program into a blueprint for interrogating terrorist suspects. Committee Chair Senator Carl Levin explained the timeline of implementing the SERE, or Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, techniques and the role of military psychologists in devising these routines.

SEN. CARLLEVIN: On October 2, 2002, a week after John Rizzo, the acting CIA general counsel, visited Gitmo, a second senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, went to Guantanamo, attended a meeting of Gitmo staff and discussed a memo proposing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques. That memo had been drafted by a psychologist and psychiatrist from Gitmo, who a couple of weeks earlier had attended that training given at Fort Bragg by instructors by the SERE school.

While the training — excuse me, while the memo remains classified, minutes from the meeting where it was discussed are not. Those minutes clearly show that the focus of the discussion was aggressive techniques for use against detainees.

When the Gitmo chief of staff suggested at the meeting that Gitmo “can’t do sleep deprivation,” Lieutenant Colonel Beaver, Gitmo’s senior lawyer, responded, “Yes, we can — with approval.” Lieutenant Beaver added that Gitmo, quote, “may need to curb the harsher operations while the International Committee of the Red Cross is around.”

Mr. Fredman, the senior CIA lawyer, suggested that it’s, quote, “very effective to identify detainee phobias and to use them” and described for the group the so-called “wet towel” technique, which we know as waterboarding. Mr. Fredman said, quote, “It can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function,” close-quote.

And Mr. Fredman presented the following disturbing perspective of our legal obligations under our anti-torture laws, saying, quote, “It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

“If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” How on earth did we get to the point where a senior US government lawyer would say that whether or not an interrogation technique is torture is, quote, “subject to perception” and that if, quote, “the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong”? The Gitmo senior JAG officer Lieutenant Colonel Beaver’s response was: “We will need documentation to protect us.”

JUANGONZALEZ: The Pentagon’s former general counsel William Haynes was repeatedly questioned at Tuesday’s hearing about his role in authorizing the interrogation techniques. During two hours of testimony, Haynes responded to dozens of questions by saying he could not recall or remember details about the process of approving the interrogation techniques. Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island blasted Haynes’s role in authorizing torture.

SEN. JACKREED: You said the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply, and they honestly ask, “What does apply?” And the only thing you sent them was: these techniques apply — no conditions, nothing. So don’t go around with this attitude of you’re protecting the integrity of the military. You degraded the integrity of the United States military.

JUANGONZALEZ: A major McClatchy newspaper series investigating the detention of terrorist suspects names Haynes as one of a group of five lawyers at the White House, Pentagon and Justice Department who called themselves the “War Council” and reinterpreted US and international laws about accountability and the treatment of prisoners. Other members of the War Council included Vice President Cheney’s former legal adviser and current chief of staff, David Addington; former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales; former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo; and former deputy to Gonzales, Timothy Flanigan.

Despite the new revelations of systematic prisoner abuse sanctioned at the highest level of government, White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto insisted Tuesday that the administration does not abuse detainees.

TONYFRATTO: I can tell you it’s always been the policy of this government to treat these detainees humanely and in line with the laws and our legal obligations.

REPORTER: Along those lines, another memo came out suggesting that a senior CIA lawyer, while you were debating this in 2002, said the only short test for torture is if a detainee dies or not and said, quote, “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.” Does that fit into the guidelines —-

TONYFRATTO: I don’t -— I don’t know who that is or who that came from. I’m telling you that abuse of detainees has never been, is not, and will never be the policy of this government.

AMYGOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour on torture. We begin with Mark Benjamin, national correspondent for Salon.com. He covered the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday. He joins us from Washington, D.C.

Welcome, Mark, to Democracy Now!

MARKBENJAMIN: Thank you for having me.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the revelations that have come out over these two days of hearings from the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday to yesterday’s House Judiciary Committee?

MARKBENJAMIN: Yes. I think particularly the hearing in the Senate, for me — and I’ve been covering Washington for over a decade — was one of the most incredible hearings I think I’ve ever been to. And the reason why, you had a quote from General Taguba in the lead up to this discussion that it was patently clear that there was an organized effort to torture and that it was against the law, and the only question left is whether anyone will be prosecuted. I have to say — it’s sort of amazing to say this, but I think he’s right.

What became painfully clear, I think, in the Senate hearing were two things. One is that soon after 9/11 — and there was testimony and documents showing this — officials from Washington, not interrogators out there in the field, were calling — you mentioned the military SERE school — officials from Washington were calling SERE school — we’re talking about CIA officials — [no audio]

AMYGOODMAN: We have just lost that feed for a minute, but he’s back. Go ahead, Mark. Continue.

MARKBENJAMIN: OK. What the hearing showed in the Senate was that officials from Washington, from the CIA, from the Department of Defense, were calling the military SERE school, asking for how we train at SERE school, the Search, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school, how we train elite soldiers at SERE school and whether those techniques could be reverse-engineered into interrogation techniques.

Now, that’s important, and the reason why it’s important is because at SERE school, what we do with the elite soldiers is we — in some cases, they go through waterboarding, they go through sensory deprivation, hooding, forced nudity, humiliation, slapping, that kind of stuff — the same things you saw at Abu Ghraib. That school is designed to train soldiers in case they are captured by an enemy who violates the Geneva Conventions. The reason why that’s important is because at that time, violating Geneva Conventions was against the law. So you have high-level officials from Washington asking about techniques that are designed to help people in case they’re tortured by somebody who violates the Geneva Conventions. So that was one thing that came out in the hearing that was just incredibly shocking.

The other thing that came out that I thought was sort of amazing was that as the Pentagon, for example, started putting together its first formal protocols of these — using these techniques to interrogate people — in other words, the first memos from Secretary Rumsfeld in late 2002 saying this is what we’re going to do to people, we’re going to do hooding, we’re going to do forced nudity, so on and so forth, sensory deprivation — before that memo was even signed, all of the branches of the military — the Marine Corps, the Navy, the Air Force and Army — all wrote memos, before that was even signed, saying this looks like a problem, because it’s against the law. And I’ve just never seen that or never heard that. And what it suggests, obviously, is that high-level — very, very high-level people in the government knew or should have known that what they were doing was against the law. It was sort of an amazing, amazing hearing.

JUANGONZALEZ: And also, about the role of the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Myers, in terms of his response to the criticism he was getting from down the ranks and how he dealt with the Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on this issue?

MARKBENJAMIN: Yeah, that was also an amazing part of the hearing. What happened was, in late 2002, while the military was preparing to formally embrace these techniques, in memos saying this is how we’re going to interrogate people at Guantanamo and elsewhere, as I said, the military services were saying, “Don’t do this. It’s a bad idea. It won’t work, and it’s against the law.”

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Richard Myers, has his own attorney, Admiral Dalton, and Admiral Dalton began a legal review, said, “Wait a minute. Let’s do a legal review. The services are having a problem,” and started a formal legal review of this process. Because of a request from Jim Haynes, who’s the Department of Defense general counsel, worked directly for Rumsfeld — Haynes went to Dalton and said, “Stop the review” — in other words, put a halt to it, muzzle the services. And what was sort of amazing, which came out in the hearing, is Richard Myers agreed and told his own lawyer, Admiral Dalton, to stop the review. And, you know, it looked pretty awful in the hearing, because you could certainly make an argument that if Richard Myers hadn’t done that, maybe this all wouldn’t have happened.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, then come back to this discussion. We’re also going to be joined by the head of the NYU Center for Torture Survivors, victims of torture, just come out with a remarkable report that Major General Taguba introduced, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives.” We’re also going to be talking with the editor at McClatchy newspapers about their eight-month investigation interviewing more than sixty former prisoners, prisoners of the US, and what happened to them. Stay with us.

ALBERTOMORA: To use so-called “harsh” interrogation techniques during the war on terror was a mistake of massive proportions. It damaged and continues to damage our nation. This policy, which may be aptly a “policy of cruelty,” violated our founding values, our constitutional system and the fabric of our laws, our overarching foreign policy interests and our national security. The net effect of this policy of cruelty has been to weaken our defenses, not to strengthen them.

Before examining the damage, it may be useful to draw some basic legal distinctions. The choice of the adjectives “harsh” or “enhanced” to describe these interrogation techniques is euphemistic and misleading. The legally correct adjective is “cruel.” Many of the counter-resistance techniques authorized for use at Guantanamo in December 2002 constitute cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that could, depending on their application, easily rise to the level of torture.

Many Americans are unaware that there is a legal distinction between cruelty and torture, cruelty being the less severe level of abuse. This has tended to obscure important elements of the interrogation debate. For example, the public may be largely unaware that the government could evasively, if truthfully, claim, and did claim, that it was not “torturing,” even as it was simultaneously applying cruelly. Yet Americans should know that there is little or no moral distinction between cruelty and torture, for cruelty can be as effective as torture in savaging human flesh and spirit and in violating human dignity. Our efforts should be focused not merely on banning torture, but on banning cruelty.

AMYGOODMAN: Former Navy general counsel Alberto Mora, blasting the Bush administration. We turn to Mark Benjamin, who is with Salon.com. The significance of Mora’s statement?

MARKBENJAMIN: I think it’s very significant, and I think we’re going to hear more and more very smart attorneys looking at the memos that came out that we were talking about from the Senate hearing, which are incredible, which show high-level Bush administration officials using techniques that were clearly, many military officials thought were, illegal, and developing them into interrogation protocol.

And I just wanted to note that Mora is a fascinating figure in this whole story. Mora is one of the people — he was general counsel of the Navy, and in late 2002, as Secretary Rumsfeld, at least on the military side, was implementing these interrogation protocols, which a lot of attorneys think are illegal, he literally was threatening Rumsfeld’s counsel Jim Haynes to rescind that order and in fact essentially threatened to go public. He succeeded in getting at least the paper pulled back. Rumsfeld did rescind it. But by that time, the memo had already been sent to Afghanistan and on to Iraq.

JUANGONZALEZ: And what about the inability of Haynes to recall, so many of the questions he was asked about, the specifics? What was the reaction to his faulty memory?

MARKBENJAMIN: I think the lawmakers were incredulous. I don’t think they believe him. I think that they believe he was trying not to incriminate himself. A lot of the people around Haynes during that period of time remember him aggressively pursuing this agenda on behalf of his boss. And by “this agenda,” I mean taking these tactics where we train, you know, soldiers to withstand an interrogation by whoever who would violate the Geneva Conventions and turn that into our own interrogation tactics. As I mentioned before, one of the things he did, for example, was he told the military to stop reviewing this decision, because the military — as I said, the services had real problems with it, because they thought it would be ineffective and they thought it would be illegal.]]>

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400“Broken Laws, Broken Lives”: Medical Study Confirms Prisoners in US Custody Were Physically & Mentally Torturedhttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/19/broken_laws_broken_lives_medical_study
tag:democracynow.org,2008-06-19:en/story/36ba34 JUAN GONZALEZ : As Congress convened hearings this week on the Bush administration’s use of controversial interrogation techniques, a new human rights report released yesterday has for the first time found medical evidence corroborating the claims of former prisoners who say they were tortured while in US custody.
The 130-page report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” was published by the group Physicians for Human Rights. It is based on the evaluation of eleven men formerly held in US prison camps overseas between 2001 and 2004. Four of the men were captured in Afghanistan and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, and seven were held in Iraq. All were released in recent years, and none was charged with a crime. Teams of medical specialists conducted physical and psychological tests on the former prisoners, including exams intended to assess if they were lying.
AMY GOODMAN : In a statement accompanying the report, retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who led the Army’s first official investigation on Abu Ghraib, said the new evidence suggested a “systematic regime of torture” inside US-run prison camps.
Dr. Allen Keller is a medical expert for the Physicians for Human Rights study. He evaluated five of the prisoners, co-wrote the report. He’s director of the Bellevue/ NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, joining us also here in our firehouse studio.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
DR. ALLEN KELLER : Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN : Dr. Keller, tell us about the five people you interviewed. What did you find?
DR. ALLEN KELLER : Well, I can even speak to the broader all eleven. So, my colleagues and I &mdash; and in each evaluation we did, we had both a medical and a mental health professional conduct detailed evaluations over the course of two days. And what we found was clear evidence of physical and psychological abuse and with devastating health consequences. Individuals reported being exposed to a variety of torture and abusive methods, including beatings, prolonged exposure to extremes of cold and heat, sexual humiliations, forced isolation, standing for extended periods, and with devastating health consequences.
And I think, as was alluded to earlier, there is a profound disconnect between these sanitized terms, such as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “torture lite” &mdash; whatever you want to call it, it’s torture, and we shouldn’t be doing it. And when we examined these individuals, we found clear evidence, both physical and psychological, of what they endured. And as a result of what they endured, they had lasting physical and psychological scars.
AMY GOODMAN : How did you examine them?
DR. ALLEN KELLER : So we conducted, first, detailed interviews, including a past medical and psychological history, trying to assess what their baseline was prior to their imprisonment, then a detailed history of the reports of abuse that they described. Subsequently, psychological evacuations were conducted, and then physical examinations were done. And then, when needed, radiographic studies were done. So very intensive evaluations done in accordance with international protocols, particularly the Istanbul Protocol.
And so, the evidence that we found was clear, whether it was scars consistent with having been shackled in painful positions or descriptions of nightmares, of continued profound feelings of humiliation. So the pain and suffering continues long after the abuse stopped.
JUAN GONZALEZ : The report &mdash; some of the men you mention, portions of what they have suffered have come out in different reports in the past, but I don’t think the detail and the extent that you have. I just wanted to read a couple of graphs of some of the individuals you mention.
One was Amir, a salesman in the Middle East who was captured in Iraq in 2003. Besides the sleep deprivation and the other things you also mention, I want to read this part. It says, &quot;At first, he was not mistreated but then was subjected to religious and sexual humiliation, hooding, sleep deprivation, restraint,” so on. He says Amir recalled experiencing &mdash; he was placed in a foul-smelling room and forced to lay down in urine, and while he was hit and kicked on his back and side, Amir was then sodomized with a broomstick and forced to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him. After a soldier stepped on his genitals, he fainted. In July 2004, he was transferred to the prison at Camp Bucca, where he reported no abuse. And then, this was at Abu Ghraib that this happened.
Another prisoner, Yussef, who was captured in Afghanistan, talked about being subjected to electric shock from a generator, feeling, quote, &quot;as if my veins were being pulled out.” So this was really not only borderline examples of torture; this was actual physical torture that was occurring here against some of these men.
DR. ALLEN KELLER : Absolutely. And it’s important, though, to note, you don’t necessarily have to lay a glove on someone for it to be torture. Sleep deprivation, all of these, quote, “enhanced” interrogation methods have devastating health consequences.
And regarding the testimony of those individuals in the information we got, I think several things also speak to their credibility. They were very forthcoming with us about when they were treated well, when they were not, what physical and psychological symptoms they did have and did not, and were forthcoming about even, you know, scars, of saying, “Oh, this was unrelated to my abuse.” You also assess their affect during the evaluations, and then based on the physical and psychological evaluations, you make an assessment.
My colleagues and I who conducted these evaluations have years of experience in doing such evaluations. And so, we were highly confident of the credibility of these individuals and the pain and suffering that resulted from their torture and abuse.
AMY GOODMAN : Dr. Allen Keller, how did it compare &mdash; you’ve treated people from eighty countries for torture. How did these prisoners compare who were tortured in US custody?
DR. ALLEN KELLER : The forms of abuse that we learned of, that we documented, are as bad, if not worse, than any I’ve heard from anywhere around the world. We arguably, tragically, are second to none in these techniques that have been used. It doesn’t mean that in countries it’s not used with much greater frequency, but I think this has actually really important ramifications.
It’s important to note that most torture survivors around the world are not terror suspects. They’re civilians. They’re Tibetan monks, speaking out for freedom in Tibet. They’re African student activists peacefully promoting democracy. And we have made the world a much more dangerous place for these individuals by condoning these methods.
AMY GOODMAN : And the role of the American Psychological Association, how important do you think it is that they haven’t banned members for participation?
DR. ALLEN KELLER : Right. Well, first, I’m a member of the American College of Physicians as a general [inaudible] and proud that they’ve taken a strong stance on this. I believe it’s crucial that the American Psychological Association do so, as well. The notion that a health professional in the room somehow lends protection is ridiculous. And in fact, to the contrary, I think it makes it more dangerous. It enables the interrogator to think, well, maybe they can go a little further. And I think there are pressures on the health professional, that like, well, should I really be speaking out? And, by the way, in our study, we did find several very disturbing reports of participation of health professionals, including mental health professionals, in the abuse.
AMY GOODMAN : We will leave it there. I want to thank you both very much for being with us. Dr. Allen Keller is director of the Bellevue/ NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. He is speaking about the report that he and his colleagues did, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact,” a report by Physicians for Human Rights. We will link to it at our website. Also, Dr. Steven Reisner, presidential candidate to head the American Psychological Association. That final vote will take place in October, after the annual meeting of the APA that will take place in Boston this summer.
This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, we&#8217;re going to speak to an editor at McClatchy Newspapers about a report they did: &quot;Guantanamo: Beyond the Law.&quot; Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : Before we move to McClatchy Newspapers, I wanted to ask Dr. Allen Keller one last question. You did say that there was participation by health professionals in some of the torture, that former prisoners revealed this to you. Who revealed it? Who was involved?
DR. ALLEN KELLER : Well, we heard very disturbing examples. For example, one individual detained in Guantanamo reported that, for example, while he was held in a room exposed to extremes of heat and cold, a health professional who he believed was a doctor would come and monitor his vital signs, never stopping the abuse &mdash; clearly a violation of medical ethics and participation in torture. This same individual also described how he spoke to a psychologist about his feelings of sadness and loneliness and worry about never seeing his family again. And subsequently, the interrogations that immediately ensued entirely changed their tones and focused in on that vulnerability, leading him to believe, and I believe as well, that this individual shared that information with the interrogators &mdash; again, clearly a violation of professional ethics.
AMY GOODMAN : Did he name the psychologist?
DR. ALLEN KELLER : He didn’t know who the psychologist was. I believe they had their names covered with tape, if I’m not mistaken, but he did not know who that was.
AMY GOODMAN : Dr. Allen Keller, thank you, and we will continue, of course, to follow this story.JUANGONZALEZ: As Congress convened hearings this week on the Bush administration’s use of controversial interrogation techniques, a new human rights report released yesterday has for the first time found medical evidence corroborating the claims of former prisoners who say they were tortured while in US custody.

The 130-page report, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” was published by the group Physicians for Human Rights. It is based on the evaluation of eleven men formerly held in US prison camps overseas between 2001 and 2004. Four of the men were captured in Afghanistan and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, and seven were held in Iraq. All were released in recent years, and none was charged with a crime. Teams of medical specialists conducted physical and psychological tests on the former prisoners, including exams intended to assess if they were lying.

AMYGOODMAN: In a statement accompanying the report, retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who led the Army’s first official investigation on Abu Ghraib, said the new evidence suggested a “systematic regime of torture” inside US-run prison camps.

Dr. Allen Keller is a medical expert for the Physicians for Human Rights study. He evaluated five of the prisoners, co-wrote the report. He’s director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, joining us also here in our firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

DR. ALLENKELLER: Thank you.

AMYGOODMAN: Dr. Keller, tell us about the five people you interviewed. What did you find?

DR. ALLENKELLER: Well, I can even speak to the broader all eleven. So, my colleagues and I — and in each evaluation we did, we had both a medical and a mental health professional conduct detailed evaluations over the course of two days. And what we found was clear evidence of physical and psychological abuse and with devastating health consequences. Individuals reported being exposed to a variety of torture and abusive methods, including beatings, prolonged exposure to extremes of cold and heat, sexual humiliations, forced isolation, standing for extended periods, and with devastating health consequences.

And I think, as was alluded to earlier, there is a profound disconnect between these sanitized terms, such as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” “torture lite” — whatever you want to call it, it’s torture, and we shouldn’t be doing it. And when we examined these individuals, we found clear evidence, both physical and psychological, of what they endured. And as a result of what they endured, they had lasting physical and psychological scars.

AMYGOODMAN: How did you examine them?

DR. ALLENKELLER: So we conducted, first, detailed interviews, including a past medical and psychological history, trying to assess what their baseline was prior to their imprisonment, then a detailed history of the reports of abuse that they described. Subsequently, psychological evacuations were conducted, and then physical examinations were done. And then, when needed, radiographic studies were done. So very intensive evaluations done in accordance with international protocols, particularly the Istanbul Protocol.

And so, the evidence that we found was clear, whether it was scars consistent with having been shackled in painful positions or descriptions of nightmares, of continued profound feelings of humiliation. So the pain and suffering continues long after the abuse stopped.

JUANGONZALEZ: The report — some of the men you mention, portions of what they have suffered have come out in different reports in the past, but I don’t think the detail and the extent that you have. I just wanted to read a couple of graphs of some of the individuals you mention.

One was Amir, a salesman in the Middle East who was captured in Iraq in 2003. Besides the sleep deprivation and the other things you also mention, I want to read this part. It says, "At first, he was not mistreated but then was subjected to religious and sexual humiliation, hooding, sleep deprivation, restraint,” so on. He says Amir recalled experiencing — he was placed in a foul-smelling room and forced to lay down in urine, and while he was hit and kicked on his back and side, Amir was then sodomized with a broomstick and forced to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him. After a soldier stepped on his genitals, he fainted. In July 2004, he was transferred to the prison at Camp Bucca, where he reported no abuse. And then, this was at Abu Ghraib that this happened.

Another prisoner, Yussef, who was captured in Afghanistan, talked about being subjected to electric shock from a generator, feeling, quote, "as if my veins were being pulled out.” So this was really not only borderline examples of torture; this was actual physical torture that was occurring here against some of these men.

DR. ALLENKELLER: Absolutely. And it’s important, though, to note, you don’t necessarily have to lay a glove on someone for it to be torture. Sleep deprivation, all of these, quote, “enhanced” interrogation methods have devastating health consequences.

And regarding the testimony of those individuals in the information we got, I think several things also speak to their credibility. They were very forthcoming with us about when they were treated well, when they were not, what physical and psychological symptoms they did have and did not, and were forthcoming about even, you know, scars, of saying, “Oh, this was unrelated to my abuse.” You also assess their affect during the evaluations, and then based on the physical and psychological evaluations, you make an assessment.

My colleagues and I who conducted these evaluations have years of experience in doing such evaluations. And so, we were highly confident of the credibility of these individuals and the pain and suffering that resulted from their torture and abuse.

AMYGOODMAN: Dr. Allen Keller, how did it compare — you’ve treated people from eighty countries for torture. How did these prisoners compare who were tortured in US custody?

DR. ALLENKELLER: The forms of abuse that we learned of, that we documented, are as bad, if not worse, than any I’ve heard from anywhere around the world. We arguably, tragically, are second to none in these techniques that have been used. It doesn’t mean that in countries it’s not used with much greater frequency, but I think this has actually really important ramifications.

It’s important to note that most torture survivors around the world are not terror suspects. They’re civilians. They’re Tibetan monks, speaking out for freedom in Tibet. They’re African student activists peacefully promoting democracy. And we have made the world a much more dangerous place for these individuals by condoning these methods.

AMYGOODMAN: And the role of the American Psychological Association, how important do you think it is that they haven’t banned members for participation?

DR. ALLENKELLER: Right. Well, first, I’m a member of the American College of Physicians as a general [inaudible] and proud that they’ve taken a strong stance on this. I believe it’s crucial that the American Psychological Association do so, as well. The notion that a health professional in the room somehow lends protection is ridiculous. And in fact, to the contrary, I think it makes it more dangerous. It enables the interrogator to think, well, maybe they can go a little further. And I think there are pressures on the health professional, that like, well, should I really be speaking out? And, by the way, in our study, we did find several very disturbing reports of participation of health professionals, including mental health professionals, in the abuse.

AMYGOODMAN: We will leave it there. I want to thank you both very much for being with us. Dr. Allen Keller is director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. He is speaking about the report that he and his colleagues did, “Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact,” a report by Physicians for Human Rights. We will link to it at our website. Also, Dr. Steven Reisner, presidential candidate to head the American Psychological Association. That final vote will take place in October, after the annual meeting of the APA that will take place in Boston this summer.

This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. When we come back, we’re going to speak to an editor at McClatchy Newspapers about a report they did: "Guantanamo: Beyond the Law." Stay with us.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: Before we move to McClatchy Newspapers, I wanted to ask Dr. Allen Keller one last question. You did say that there was participation by health professionals in some of the torture, that former prisoners revealed this to you. Who revealed it? Who was involved?

DR. ALLENKELLER: Well, we heard very disturbing examples. For example, one individual detained in Guantanamo reported that, for example, while he was held in a room exposed to extremes of heat and cold, a health professional who he believed was a doctor would come and monitor his vital signs, never stopping the abuse — clearly a violation of medical ethics and participation in torture. This same individual also described how he spoke to a psychologist about his feelings of sadness and loneliness and worry about never seeing his family again. And subsequently, the interrogations that immediately ensued entirely changed their tones and focused in on that vulnerability, leading him to believe, and I believe as well, that this individual shared that information with the interrogators — again, clearly a violation of professional ethics.

AMYGOODMAN: Did he name the psychologist?

DR. ALLENKELLER: He didn’t know who the psychologist was. I believe they had their names covered with tape, if I’m not mistaken, but he did not know who that was.

AMYGOODMAN: Dr. Allen Keller, thank you, and we will continue, of course, to follow this story.]]>

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400Clive Stafford Smith: US Holding 27,000 in Secret Overseas Prisons; Transporting Prisoners to Iraqi Jails to Avoid Media & Legal Scrutinyhttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/19/clive_stafford_smith
tag:democracynow.org,2008-05-19:en/story/33f2ad AMY GOODMAN : A military judge has postponed the first war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo to allow a Supreme Court ruling to be made on the right of prisoners to challenge their detention in civil courts. The trial against Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, was scheduled to start on June 2nd. Navy Captain Keith Allred ruled on Friday the trial should be delayed seven weeks, until July 21st, in case the Supreme Court ruling affects his case.
The court is considering a challenge to a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that denies Guantanamo prisoners the right to file petition of habeas corpus . It marks the third time the Supreme Court has examined the rights of prisoners held at Guantanamo. A ruling is expected June 30th.
In a separate ruling, the judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation for Hamdan to determine if he is competent to stand trial. A psychiatrist hired by his lawyers found he suffers from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and can’t participate in his defense. The military says he has no signs of any problems.
The US holds about 270 prisoners at Guantanamo now and has said it plans to bring about eighty before the tribunals, the first to be held by the United States since World War II.
Clive Stafford Smith is a British attorney who represents more than fifty of the prisoners at Guantanamo, legal director of the UK charity Reprieve and author of Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay . He is testifying on Tuesday before the House Committee on Foreign Relations about Guantanamo Bay. He joins from Washington, D.C.
Welcome to Democracy Now! again, Clive Stafford Smith.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : Well, thank you very much for having me again.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the significance of the Hamdan case?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : Well, of course, the Hamdan case has dragged on and on and on, and it’s, I think, highlighted the mess that Guantanamo Bay is in down there. And really, the most eloquent spokesperson on that is not me; it’s Colonel Morris Davis, who was the chief prosecutor of the process until he resigned recently, the chief military prosecutor in Guantanamo Bay.
And he had three criticisms, and he recently testified in Guantanamo about his criticisms. One is that the process is rigged. He said that he been told by a senior Bush administration official that there would be and there could be no acquittals in Guantanamo. In other words, everyone has to be convicted. He also said that there was intense politicization of the process. And indeed, Judge &mdash; the judge, Captain Allred, prohibited some of the senior offices, including Brigadier General Hartmann, from having any more role in the process, because they were basically telling everyone what to do. And I think the third one is the most important, which is that Colonel Davis said we really ought to ban the use of evidence that’s been extracted through abuse and torture, such as waterboarding, from Guantanamo trials, because it’s still being used down there. And then, indeed, one of my clients, Benyam Mohammed, it’s all they have got on him, is evidence that they extracted from him after taking him to Morocco and torturing him with a razor blade to his genitals. So this is just a &mdash; it’s a farce.
But if you step back for a second and you compare what’s happening in Guantanamo to the best job we ever did as Americans &mdash; and I’m American, as well, despite the accent &mdash; Nuremburg tribunals, which were really a beacon of the way the process should be run. Perhaps one of the highlights of Guantanamo is, the first three people we charged there were not Hermann Göring and the people who were the worst in the Nazis in World War II. Instead, the first three people we charged were Salim Hamdan, who is allegedly a chauffeur for bin Laden, and then two juveniles, Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad, who were both juveniles. And I think that puts it a little bit in context of how carried away the military process has got down there.
AMY GOODMAN : Clive, can you talk about the significance of last week, of the Pentagon dropping charges against the Saudi man held at Guantanamo who was at the center of the military’s controversial torture program, Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused of being the twentieth hijacker? They’ve dropped the charges against him.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : They did, indeed. And what was really extraordinary, in one way, was that they charged Mohammed al-Qahtani with the death penalty in the first place, because, if you recall, it was a leaked Freedom of Information document that came out in his case, which detailed, you know, hour by hour and day by day, the abuses he had been through in Guantanamo Bay that was splashed all over the US media a couple of years back. And, you know, one wonders at the judgment of people in Guantanamo that they charged him early on for the death penalty, where we were going to spend weeks and weeks and weeks in trial in Guantanamo listening to evidence about him being abused, where there’s already documentary proof of it.
Now, they’ve dropped his case now, and I sincerely hope that they have enough sense not to go forward against him with evidence that’s extracted through torture. He’s being represented by Center for Constitutional Rights, amongst others, and I think it’s through their great work that this has happened.
AMY GOODMAN : Also, the latest news of the disqualifying of &mdash; a military judge disqualifying the Pentagon general who has been centrally involved in overseeing the war crimes tribunals, named Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, saying he couldn’t be objective, working too closely with the prosecutor.
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : Well, and this was as a result, as I had mentioned briefly, of Colonel Mo Davis’s testimony, the chief prosecutor from the process down there who quit because of Hartmann’s intermeddling. And Colonel Davis is &mdash; and I think he’s so much more credible than someone like me, quite frankly, because he was on the prosecution side. And his criticism was that Brigadier General Hartmann was basically telling him what to do and saying, “Look, there’s an election coming up. It’s in November. We’ve got to have prosecutions now against the high-profile guys. It doesn’t matter if you&#8217;re not ready to prosecute them, but we need Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial because of electioneering.”
Now, you know, that’s not the way any process should work. But the fact that the chief military prosecutor says this is what’s going on, I think, is enough to give us all pause and say, look, let&#8217;s stop this process, let&#8217;s do what most of the political candidates say in the election, which is bring people to the US if we want to try them and give them a proper trial. That’s really what America is all about.
AMY GOODMAN : And the significance of the US military planning to build a new forty-acre prison complex in Afghanistan near Kabul, a $60 million dollar site replacing the makeshift prison at Bagram that apparently holds around 630 prisoners right now, a number of them held for more than five years without charge?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : Well you know, one thing that my charity, Reprieve, out of London, we’ve been trying to do is track down the real ghost prisoners in this process. And if you look at Guantanamo Bay, 270, roughly, as you mentioned, prisoners in Guantanamo, but according to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world. So that means that 99 percent of these folk are not in Guantanamo Bay. Now they’re in other prisons elsewhere. And as you mentioned, Bagram has 680. But there’s a huge number of people being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn’t get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps rather annoying people like you, Amy &mdash; I mean the media &mdash; and also annoying people like me, lawyers, away from the prisoners so they can’t get any sort of legal rights.
And when you look around the world, there&#8217;s a huge camp, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, where a lot of people are being held. Diego Garcia, contrary to the past analysis of the British government, in the Indian Ocean has been used, in my belief, to hold people. And we’ve identified thirty-two prison ships, sort of prison hulks you used to read about in Victorian England, which have been converted to hold prisoners, and we’ve got pictures of them in Lisbon Harbor, for example. And these are holding prisoners around the world, as well. And there&#8217;s a bunch of proxy prisons &mdash; Morocco, Egypt and Jordan &mdash; where this stuff is going on. And this is a huge concern, because the world focus is on Guantanamo Bay, which really is a diversionary tactic in the whole war of terror or war on terror, whatever you’d like to call it. And actually, most of these people who have been severed from their legal rights are in these other secret prisons around the world.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re talking to Clive Stafford Smith. He is a British lawyer who represents &mdash; well, what is it now? About 20 percent of the prisoners, since the number is now below 300?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : I think you&#8217;re giving me a little too much credit, actually, Amy. We’ve got thirty-one prisoners there now. We’ve got fifty, thankfully, who are out, including &mdash; I had a lovely visit the other day to Sudan &mdash; Sami Al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist, who was held for six years in Guantanamo Bay, most recently charged with being a terrorist because he had trained in the use of “the camera” &mdash; was the direct quote &mdash;- by Al Jazeera. That was the allegation against him that was the main focus of the US intelligence in Guantanamo, and that’s because he was an Al Jazeera cameraman. He is now back with his family. So I’m glad he’s safe -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : You were just with him in Sudan?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : Yeah, yeah. I was in the hospital, and he had been &mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : How is Sami Al-Hajj?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : Well, you know, there was some Pentagon press release saying that he was faking how ill he was. You know, that really makes my blood a little boil. He had been on hunger strike for 478 days. On the flight back to Sudan, which went via Baghdad and was twenty hours long, he had no water, no food, didn’t go to the toilet the whole time. And he was really in very, very bad shape when he showed up in Sudan, got rushed to hospital.
I am glad to say that he’s getting a lot better. And I was there with him and his wife and his little seven-year-old son. And I’m just so glad we finally got around to letting him go, because I think that was a tragedy for our US reputation around the world that we were holding a cameraman and saying that he was some terrorist, and every day on Al Jazeera &mdash; every hour, in fact &mdash; there would be a little strap line along the bottom of the TV screen, where forty million people would see that Sami Al-Hajj was still being held in Guantanamo. So I’m glad that he’s finally out.
AMY GOODMAN : And the issue of Sami Al-Hajj saying he was being repeatedly questioned about the leaders, about those who run Al Jazeera and about his colleagues at Al Jazeera?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : Well, that was the focus. I mean, and Sami actually had to ask the intelligence folk in Guantanamo &mdash; and I was very interested listening to the person you were talking to before, Tim, about the whole process, because of course it’s so true that the focus of a lot of these civilian folk who were doing the intelligence gathering, you know, I don’t know how they think they get paid, but apparently they get paid just by the word. And they interrogated Sami Al-Hajj roughly 120 times about people working at Al Jazeera, trying to get him to say that Al Jazeera was an al-Qaeda front. And Sami said, “It’s just not true. I’m not going to say that.” But this went on and on. And finally Sami had to ask them to interrogate him about himself and whatever allegations they might have against him.
AMY GOODMAN : Very quickly, Clive, did you say that you &mdash; that the US is taking prisoners to Iraq?
CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH : Oh, yes, they are. I mean, the US is taking an estimated forty to sixty, on average, prisoners a day around the world. And it doesn’t take a lot of arithmetic to tell you how many people that is each month. And people are being taken to Iraq to be held in Abu Ghraib, even today, and also in other camps in Iraq. And this is a big challenge for us as the lawyers to try to bring &mdash; you know, reunite them with their legal rights, because I, for one, am sort of forbidden by my wife from spending too much time going to Iraq and getting shot at.
AMY GOODMAN : We’re going to have to leave it there. Clive Stafford Smith will be testifying before Congress tomorrow. His book is called Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side . He is a lawyer from Britain representing more than thirty prisoners at Guantanamo. AMYGOODMAN:

A military judge has postponed the first war crimes tribunal at Guantanamo to allow a Supreme Court ruling to be made on the right of prisoners to challenge their detention in civil courts. The trial against Osama bin Laden’s former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, was scheduled to start on June 2nd. Navy Captain Keith Allred ruled on Friday the trial should be delayed seven weeks, until July 21st, in case the Supreme Court ruling affects his case.

The court is considering a challenge to a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that denies Guantanamo prisoners the right to file petition of habeas corpus. It marks the third time the Supreme Court has examined the rights of prisoners held at Guantanamo. A ruling is expected June 30th.

In a separate ruling, the judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation for Hamdan to determine if he is competent to stand trial. A psychiatrist hired by his lawyers found he suffers from depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and can’t participate in his defense. The military says he has no signs of any problems.

The US holds about 270 prisoners at Guantanamo now and has said it plans to bring about eighty before the tribunals, the first to be held by the United States since World War II.

Clive Stafford Smith is a British attorney who represents more than fifty of the prisoners at Guantanamo, legal director of the UK charity Reprieve and author of Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay. He is testifying on Tuesday before the House Committee on Foreign Relations about Guantanamo Bay. He joins from Washington, D.C.

Welcome to Democracy Now! again, Clive Stafford Smith.

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

Well, thank you very much for having me again.

AMYGOODMAN:

Can you talk about the significance of the Hamdan case?

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

Well, of course, the Hamdan case has dragged on and on and on, and it’s, I think, highlighted the mess that Guantanamo Bay is in down there. And really, the most eloquent spokesperson on that is not me; it’s Colonel Morris Davis, who was the chief prosecutor of the process until he resigned recently, the chief military prosecutor in Guantanamo Bay.

And he had three criticisms, and he recently testified in Guantanamo about his criticisms. One is that the process is rigged. He said that he been told by a senior Bush administration official that there would be and there could be no acquittals in Guantanamo. In other words, everyone has to be convicted. He also said that there was intense politicization of the process. And indeed, Judge — the judge, Captain Allred, prohibited some of the senior offices, including Brigadier General Hartmann, from having any more role in the process, because they were basically telling everyone what to do. And I think the third one is the most important, which is that Colonel Davis said we really ought to ban the use of evidence that’s been extracted through abuse and torture, such as waterboarding, from Guantanamo trials, because it’s still being used down there. And then, indeed, one of my clients, Benyam Mohammed, it’s all they have got on him, is evidence that they extracted from him after taking him to Morocco and torturing him with a razor blade to his genitals. So this is just a — it’s a farce.

But if you step back for a second and you compare what’s happening in Guantanamo to the best job we ever did as Americans — and I’m American, as well, despite the accent — Nuremburg tribunals, which were really a beacon of the way the process should be run. Perhaps one of the highlights of Guantanamo is, the first three people we charged there were not Hermann Göring and the people who were the worst in the Nazis in World War II. Instead, the first three people we charged were Salim Hamdan, who is allegedly a chauffeur for bin Laden, and then two juveniles, Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad, who were both juveniles. And I think that puts it a little bit in context of how carried away the military process has got down there.

AMYGOODMAN:

Clive, can you talk about the significance of last week, of the Pentagon dropping charges against the Saudi man held at Guantanamo who was at the center of the military’s controversial torture program, Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused of being the twentieth hijacker? They’ve dropped the charges against him.

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

They did, indeed. And what was really extraordinary, in one way, was that they charged Mohammed al-Qahtani with the death penalty in the first place, because, if you recall, it was a leaked Freedom of Information document that came out in his case, which detailed, you know, hour by hour and day by day, the abuses he had been through in Guantanamo Bay that was splashed all over the US media a couple of years back. And, you know, one wonders at the judgment of people in Guantanamo that they charged him early on for the death penalty, where we were going to spend weeks and weeks and weeks in trial in Guantanamo listening to evidence about him being abused, where there’s already documentary proof of it.

Now, they’ve dropped his case now, and I sincerely hope that they have enough sense not to go forward against him with evidence that’s extracted through torture. He’s being represented by Center for Constitutional Rights, amongst others, and I think it’s through their great work that this has happened.

AMYGOODMAN:

Also, the latest news of the disqualifying of — a military judge disqualifying the Pentagon general who has been centrally involved in overseeing the war crimes tribunals, named Brigadier General Thomas Hartmann, saying he couldn’t be objective, working too closely with the prosecutor.

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

Well, and this was as a result, as I had mentioned briefly, of Colonel Mo Davis’s testimony, the chief prosecutor from the process down there who quit because of Hartmann’s intermeddling. And Colonel Davis is — and I think he’s so much more credible than someone like me, quite frankly, because he was on the prosecution side. And his criticism was that Brigadier General Hartmann was basically telling him what to do and saying, “Look, there’s an election coming up. It’s in November. We’ve got to have prosecutions now against the high-profile guys. It doesn’t matter if you’re not ready to prosecute them, but we need Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial because of electioneering.”

Now, you know, that’s not the way any process should work. But the fact that the chief military prosecutor says this is what’s going on, I think, is enough to give us all pause and say, look, let’s stop this process, let’s do what most of the political candidates say in the election, which is bring people to the US if we want to try them and give them a proper trial. That’s really what America is all about.

AMYGOODMAN:

And the significance of the US military planning to build a new forty-acre prison complex in Afghanistan near Kabul, a $60 million dollar site replacing the makeshift prison at Bagram that apparently holds around 630 prisoners right now, a number of them held for more than five years without charge?

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

Well you know, one thing that my charity, Reprieve, out of London, we’ve been trying to do is track down the real ghost prisoners in this process. And if you look at Guantanamo Bay, 270, roughly, as you mentioned, prisoners in Guantanamo, but according to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world. So that means that 99 percent of these folk are not in Guantanamo Bay. Now they’re in other prisons elsewhere. And as you mentioned, Bagram has 680. But there’s a huge number of people being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn’t get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps rather annoying people like you, Amy — I mean the media — and also annoying people like me, lawyers, away from the prisoners so they can’t get any sort of legal rights.

And when you look around the world, there’s a huge camp, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, where a lot of people are being held. Diego Garcia, contrary to the past analysis of the British government, in the Indian Ocean has been used, in my belief, to hold people. And we’ve identified thirty-two prison ships, sort of prison hulks you used to read about in Victorian England, which have been converted to hold prisoners, and we’ve got pictures of them in Lisbon Harbor, for example. And these are holding prisoners around the world, as well. And there’s a bunch of proxy prisons — Morocco, Egypt and Jordan — where this stuff is going on. And this is a huge concern, because the world focus is on Guantanamo Bay, which really is a diversionary tactic in the whole war of terror or war on terror, whatever you’d like to call it. And actually, most of these people who have been severed from their legal rights are in these other secret prisons around the world.

AMYGOODMAN:

We’re talking to Clive Stafford Smith. He is a British lawyer who represents — well, what is it now? About 20 percent of the prisoners, since the number is now below 300?

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

I think you’re giving me a little too much credit, actually, Amy. We’ve got thirty-one prisoners there now. We’ve got fifty, thankfully, who are out, including — I had a lovely visit the other day to Sudan — Sami Al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist, who was held for six years in Guantanamo Bay, most recently charged with being a terrorist because he had trained in the use of “the camera” — was the direct quote —- by Al Jazeera. That was the allegation against him that was the main focus of the US intelligence in Guantanamo, and that’s because he was an Al Jazeera cameraman. He is now back with his family. So I’m glad he’s safe -—

AMYGOODMAN:

You were just with him in Sudan?

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

Yeah, yeah. I was in the hospital, and he had been —

AMYGOODMAN:

How is Sami Al-Hajj?

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

Well, you know, there was some Pentagon press release saying that he was faking how ill he was. You know, that really makes my blood a little boil. He had been on hunger strike for 478 days. On the flight back to Sudan, which went via Baghdad and was twenty hours long, he had no water, no food, didn’t go to the toilet the whole time. And he was really in very, very bad shape when he showed up in Sudan, got rushed to hospital.

I am glad to say that he’s getting a lot better. And I was there with him and his wife and his little seven-year-old son. And I’m just so glad we finally got around to letting him go, because I think that was a tragedy for our US reputation around the world that we were holding a cameraman and saying that he was some terrorist, and every day on Al Jazeera — every hour, in fact — there would be a little strap line along the bottom of the TV screen, where forty million people would see that Sami Al-Hajj was still being held in Guantanamo. So I’m glad that he’s finally out.

AMYGOODMAN:

And the issue of Sami Al-Hajj saying he was being repeatedly questioned about the leaders, about those who run Al Jazeera and about his colleagues at Al Jazeera?

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

Well, that was the focus. I mean, and Sami actually had to ask the intelligence folk in Guantanamo — and I was very interested listening to the person you were talking to before, Tim, about the whole process, because of course it’s so true that the focus of a lot of these civilian folk who were doing the intelligence gathering, you know, I don’t know how they think they get paid, but apparently they get paid just by the word. And they interrogated Sami Al-Hajj roughly 120 times about people working at Al Jazeera, trying to get him to say that Al Jazeera was an al-Qaeda front. And Sami said, “It’s just not true. I’m not going to say that.” But this went on and on. And finally Sami had to ask them to interrogate him about himself and whatever allegations they might have against him.

AMYGOODMAN:

Very quickly, Clive, did you say that you — that the US is taking prisoners to Iraq?

CLIVESTAFFORDSMITH:

Oh, yes, they are. I mean, the US is taking an estimated forty to sixty, on average, prisoners a day around the world. And it doesn’t take a lot of arithmetic to tell you how many people that is each month. And people are being taken to Iraq to be held in Abu Ghraib, even today, and also in other camps in Iraq. And this is a big challenge for us as the lawyers to try to bring — you know, reunite them with their legal rights, because I, for one, am sort of forbidden by my wife from spending too much time going to Iraq and getting shot at.

AMYGOODMAN:

We’re going to have to leave it there. Clive Stafford Smith will be testifying before Congress tomorrow. His book is called Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side. He is a lawyer from Britain representing more than thirty prisoners at Guantanamo.

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Mon, 19 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400"Torture Team": British Attorney Philippe Sands on the White House Role in Sanctioning Torturehttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/8/torture_team_british_attorney_philippe_sands
tag:democracynow.org,2008-05-08:en/story/db4edd AMY GOODMAN : The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold a series of hearings examining the Bush administration’s role in authorizing the illegal torture of prisoners in US custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere. On Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers subpoenaed Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, to testify at a hearing scheduled for June 26th.
Three other former Bush administration officials have already agreed to testify: former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Justice Department attorney John Yoo and former Pentagon official Douglas Feith. Over the past month, more evidence has emerged tying high-ranking Bush administration officials to the use of torture.
In April, ABC News reported Vice President Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft all discussed and approved how top al-Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA .
President Bush has also confirmed he was aware of these meetings. In an interview with ABC News, Bush said, “We started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people. And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”
Today, we’re joined by British attorney and author, Philippe Sands. He is the author of the new book Torture Team: Rumsfeld&#8217;s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values . On Tuesday, Philippe Sands testified before the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
PHILIPPE SANDS : It’s great to be back, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN : It’s good to have you with us. Talk about the Conyers subpoena of Vice President Dick Cheney&#8217;s chief of staff, David Addington.
PHILIPPE SANDS : Sure. Well, if you remember, we talked about a month ago, after a piece I had written for Vanity Fair came out. That piece, I’m told by Congressman Conyers, catalyzed his committee into focusing on the role of the lawyers, and they began the process of setting up hearings. Yesterday was the first hearing. They’ve issued letters of invitation to all of the lawyers that I’ve written about and several other individuals. All, I understand, have agreed to come voluntarily, with one exception, and that’s Mr. Addington, who was the Vice President’s lawyer at the time, now his chief of staff. He has indicated, however, in a letter of the 1st of May, that if subpoenaed, he would attend, and it is likely that he will now attend next month.
AMY GOODMAN : And what did you raise in your testimony before the congressional subcommittee?
PHILIPPE SANDS : Well, I think &mdash; I raised a number of issues, but the heart of this story is that the administration has spun a narrative that this was a bottom-up thing, they were simply reacting to requests from people on the ground. And what I’ve discovered, and what was the center of the gravity of what I said to the subcommittee, is that’s a false narrative. It came from the top down. A crime was committed in relation to the detainee that I’m looking at. The Geneva Conventions were violated. He was abused. He was probably, almost certainly, tortured in violation of international law. But the biggest story may well be the cover-up, the spin, that this came from the bottom up, when in fact it was top-down. And that seemed to have resonated with the committee.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about this ABC News revelation about this Principals Committee, all the names that I just gave &mdash; you know, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft &mdash; first time senior White House officials linked to an explicit group authorizing the CIA interrogation program, one top official recounting Ashcroft was the lone cabinet member to raise doubts? The official quoted Ashcroft as saying, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
PHILIPPE SANDS : I think it’s a very important revelation. Of course, it deals not with the military interrogations that I focused on, but with the CIA interrogations, but they went hand-in-hand, and it’s plain that they were all part and parcel of a decision taken at the top. It confirms my investigation, as a consequence; it’s namely that this came straight from the top.
The significance, of course, of this is that there seems to be a question as to whether the people immediately below the principals knew about this. I was in conversation, for example, a couple of days ago with Colin Powell&#8217;s former chief of staff, who expressed &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : Lawrence Wilkerson?
PHILIPPE SANDS : Larry Wilkerson, who -&mdash; I asked him, “Were you aware of this?” He said, “Absolutely not.” I asked him, “Did you have any inkling that this was going on? Do you think it could have happened?” And he expressed some considerable surprise. But if the President of the United States says a meeting happened, he knew about it, he approved it, it becomes, I think, a very, very big story, because you’ve got confirmation from the main man, so to speak.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the missing records of Mohammed al-Qahtani.
PHILIPPE SANDS : Well, I discovered in the course of meeting &mdash; I went around America, was treated with great hospitality and friendship. I spoke to everyone in the decision-making process, from the lawyers down at the bottom, Major General Dunlavey, who was the combatant commander at Guantanamo at the time, and his lawyer Diane Beaver, right up to Jim Haynes, who wrote the memorandum, the famous memorandum in which Mr. Rumsfeld scrolled, “Why is standing limited to four hours? I stand for eight to ten hours a day.”
AMY GOODMAN : Wait, explain that memo. It’s also the cover of your book.
PHILIPPE SANDS : It is the cover.
AMY GOODMAN : You’ve got the handwritten note of Donald Rumsfeld. First you see his signature, and then you see this note, “I stand for eight to ten hours a day. Why four hours?”
PHILIPPE SANDS : It’s become iconic. What Mr. Rumsfeld did was he authorized fifteen techniques of interrogation, but he wrote at the bottom of the document, “I stand for eight to ten hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”
That’s been interpreted a number of ways. Was he signaling to the interrogators that the Secretary of Defense was willing for them to go further? Or was it just a jocular comment? I discussed that with a lot of people.
One of the people I met with on a couple of occasions, lengthy conversations, was Mike Dunlavey, the head of interrogations. And right at the end of one of the conversations, he mentioned to me that he had made efforts to go back to get hold of all the documentation to check the computers, to check the record of what had happened, and that there had been, he discovered, what he called a SNAFU , and everything had been lost.
And I think it will be for others now to follow up as to whether the interrogation materials relating to al-Qahtani have suffered the same fate as the interrogation materials of the CIA that, as we now know, were destroyed.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers?
PHILIPPE SANDS : I had one lengthy and fascinating conversation with General Myers. I thought he was a decent man of integrity, but out of his depth. And on two issues, I was staggered, so staggered, in fact, that when I came home to London from my trip to the United States, I told my wife what I discovered in conversation with him, which I’m about to share with you, and she was disbelieving &mdash; she listened to the tapes &mdash; and said absolutely.
There were two points. Firstly, as everyone knows, the President took a decision that none of the detainees at Guantanamo would have any rights under the Geneva Conventions. It seems that General Myers was unaware of that. He was under the impression they had decided that Geneva would apply. So that was a fairly staggering discovery. But it was as nothing compared to the discovery, as we went through the techniques of interrogation one by one, that he had thought that these came out of the US Field Manual guide for interrogations. They were all prohibited. And as we went down the list, his jaw literally dropped. So I got the sense that the most powerful military man in the United States, indeed probably in the world, was blissfully unaware of what had been decided.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re talking to Philippe Sands. His book is Torture Team &mdash; it is just out this week &mdash; Rumsfeld&#8217;s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values .
I want to ask you about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia&#8217;s recent statement that the torture of prisoners does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Scalia’s comment came during an interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes .
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : I don’t like torture. I’m &mdash; although defining it is going to be a nice trick. But, I mean, who’s in favor of it? Nobody. And we have a law against torture. But if the &mdash; everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution.
LESLEY STAHL : If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression, “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : No, no.
LESLEY STAHL : Cruel and unusual punishment?
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : To the contrary. You think &mdash; you think that you would &mdash;- has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.
LESLEY STAHL : Well, I think if you’re in custody and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody -&mdash;
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : And you say he’s punishing you?
LESLEY STAHL : Sure.
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : What’s he punishing you for? You punish somebody &mdash;-
LESLEY STAHL : Well, because he assumes you, one, either committed a crime -&mdash;
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : No, no.
LESLEY STAHL : &mdash; or that you know something that he wants to know.
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : Ah, it’s the latter. And when he’s &mdash; when he’s &mdash;- when he’s hurting you in order to get information from you -&mdash;
LESLEY STAHL : Yeah?
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : &mdash; you don’t say he’s punishing you. What’s he punishing you for? He’s trying to extract &mdash;-
LESLEY STAHL : Because he thinks you’re a terrorist, and he’s going to beat the you-know-what out of you.
JUSTICE ANTONIN SCALIA : Anyway, that’s my view. And it happens to be correct.
AMY GOODMAN : Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, being questioned by 60 Minutes ’s Lesley Stahl. Philippe Sands?
PHILIPPE SANDS : I’m not an expert on US constitutional law. I’ll talk about what I know, which is international law. The US is a party to all of those conventions that prohibit torture. That is a shocking statement by a serving justice, who I know is very partial to the television program 24 , along with his colleague Clarence Thomas. It’s -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : Explain 24 .
PHILIPPE SANDS : 24 is a television program in which the use of torture is essentially rejoiced in as a technique for producing meaningful information. It had an effect down at Guantanamo. One of the things I discovered in my conversations was that people watched it, people were influenced by it, probably apparently as Antonin Scalia is.
But that is a shocking statement. And I put it in these terms. If he’s going to express that view, that the United States president is free to authorize torture, then why isn&#8217;t the Iranian president free to authorize torture against American nationals? Why isn’t the Egyptian president free to organize &mdash; authorize torture? The logic of the argument is really surprising and, frankly, outrageous.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to ask you, Philippe Sands, about the possibility of US officials being charged with war crimes. You were quoted in a New York Times piece on Tuesday: “Mr. Sands, a British law professor, said two foreign prosecutors, whom he did not name, asked him for the materials on which his book Torture Team was based. ‘If the US doesn’t address this,’ he said, ‘other countries will.’&quot;
PHILIPPE SANDS : That’s an accurate account, and I describe, in one of the concluding chapters of the book, conversations I had with a European prosecutor and a European judge. And the committee was very interested in that, in relation to a question they asked me and the other witnesses giving testimony: “What should this committee do?” And the answer that I gave was, “Look, it’s not for me to make recommendations on precisely what you do and don’t do, but what needs to happen is the United States needs to get involved in an accounting process. The committee needs to establish the facts. And if the United States doesn’t, others will do it.” And I have no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that investigations will take place, if they’re not already taking place, and that some of these individuals, if they travel outside the United States, will face a very real threat of investigation.
AMY GOODMAN : And the legality of what President Bush said, or the implications of it, when he said to ABC News, “We started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people. Yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue, and I approved”?
PHILIPPE SANDS : Well, it appears to be an admission that the President of the United States authorized torture, that he authorized waterboarding. The convention prohibiting torture, the Geneva Conventions are absolutely clear: there are no circumstances in which torture is permitted. And if the account is accurate, the President is, in effect, owning up to the fact that he has committed a war crime. And under the torture convention, there is an obligation to investigate any person who has committed a war crime. So it was a very surprising admission. I wonder if it was fully thought through. If it’s accurate, it is deeply disturbing.
AMY GOODMAN : Philippe Sands, you talked in your testimony before Congress about torture and what Britain learned in its fight with the IRA , with the Irish Republican Army.
PHILIPPE SANDS : In many ways, that was actually the most interesting exchange that I had, because I had it with some seemingly very sensible Republican congressmen, who were very interested and came up and talked to me about that afterwards. What I shared was that the experience of Brits across the political spectrum &mdash; it’s not a left-right issue, as I explained &mdash; derives from the experience we had in the early 1970s, in which the United Kingdom moved to aggressive interrogation. And they used pretty much the same techniques of interrogation: hooding, stress, humiliation. And it backfired terribly. On all military accounts, it extended the conflict by between fifteen and twenty years, because it creates such resentment in the community that is associated with the people who are being abused that it served to generate further opposition and people moving to violence. So basically the message is: it doesn’t work. And no one in the United Kingdom, literally no one from any of the main political parties or across the political spectrum will in any circumstances support what has been apparently authorized by the President in this country.
AMY GOODMAN : Philippe Sands, I wanted to ask you about a report out of Associated Press. A Kuwaiti freed from Guantanamo Bay carried out a suicide car bombing recently in Iraq &mdash; the US military said this on Wednesday, confirming what’s believed to be the first such attack by a former detainee at Guantanamo. Tom Wilner, al-Ajmi’s American lawyer, said incarceration at Guantanamo may have turned the Kuwaiti into a terrorist. Wilner said, quote, &quot;I don’t know whether the experience of being kept down there in isolation radicalized him.&quot;
PHILIPPE SANDS : I read that report, and I was &mdash; this morning &mdash; and I was disturbed by that report. I mean, I find that the whole system that has been created at Guantanamo is abhorrent. It doesn’t meet minimum international standards. It sends out a terrible signal to the rest of the world. Most of the people, I think, being held at Guantanamo are really not seriously problematic people. But undoubtedly, there are some problematic people, and steps do need to be taken in order to protect countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.
&lt;P.That said, I immediately, reading the article, asked myself the question: is this individual someone who fell into that small category of persons who was, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, a seriously bad person? We don’t know that. And there is the possibility that the treatment that he was subjected to gave rise to an IRA type of situation, that it so enraged him, that it so enraged his community, that it essentially politicized him and energized him. Of course, we don’t know the facts, and I think we need to find out a lot more about the facts before expressing a final view.
AMY GOODMAN : You live in Britain. Your book is Torture Team , though, about the United States and international law. The people involved that you&#8217;re talking about go across the gamut, now a number out of office. You have John Yoo, for example, who’s a law professor at University of California, Berkeley. You have Douglas Feith, who’s now teaching at Georgetown. What are your thoughts about this?
PHILIPPE SANDS : John Yoo’s dean at Berkeley has been subject to intense criticism for not firing him, and indeed there was even an op-ed, an opinion, an editorial, in the New York Times , saying he basically shouldn’t be teaching there anymore. Dean Edley wrote an interesting letter, in which he said, look, there’s freedom of expression, that includes freedom of views, and under the rules at Berkeley, you can only fire someone if they’ve been convicted in a court of law of committing a criminal offense. And John Yoo has not been convicted of committing a criminal offense. And in our system, you are innocent until proven guilty.
I’ve laid out the reasons why I believe John Yoo has participated in authorizing torture, and that exposes him to investigation. But I entirely accept that until he is actually condemned by a court of law, he is perfectly entitled to carry on peddling views, even if I violently and fundamentally disagree with those views.
As regards Doug Feith, I spent time with him. He’s an entertaining character, but he’s a scary character. I’ve read his book, 900 pages on war and decision, five pages devoted to the issue of interrogations. And you read that book, and you have no idea that this man was deeply involved in the decisions that I write about. It’s spin. It’s whitewash. There&#8217;s a failure to accept responsibility. And that, I think, is what is going to cause them in difficulty, because it’s essentially a cover-up.
AMY GOODMAN : We invited Douglas Feith on the show, but we didn’t get a response. Can you talk about the significance of the 1947 case, United States of America v. Josef Altstoetter ?
PHILIPPE SANDS : It ‘s a delicate case. It’s one of the cases known as the Justice Cases, the only time that lawyers have ever been convicted of international crimes for carrying out their professional activities.
AMY GOODMAN : Lawyers?
PHILIPPE SANDS : Lawyers. The focus was on lawyers. I included reference to that case in my book, because I found it ironic that the theory that lawyers could cross a line and be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted for committing international crimes was a theory that was drawn up by the United States military itself, and then we come full-circle sixty years on, and we find that, with Mr. Rumsfeld&#8217;s hand, abuse is authorized and permitted by the US military in plain violation of international rules, but also in plain violation of President Lincoln&#8217;s disposition, going back to 1863, that the US doesn’t do cruelty.
But the case is an important one. It’s not a bang-on point, and I’m absolutely not drawing analogies. I’m not saying that these lawyers are equivalent to those lawyers or this regime is equivalent to that regime. What I’m interested in is the circumstance, in when does a lawyer cross a line into criminality?
And coming back to an earlier question that you raised, the European judge and the European prosecutor that I met, when I laid out all the materials for them, they came back with a most startling conclusion. They said, “Philippe, the bottom line of it is, there is no distinction between the man or woman who interrogates and the man or woman who authorizes by law an abusive interrogation. They are both subject to investigation. They are both subject to prosecution.” And I think that’s the way the law has gone, and it’s a law that is right, and it is a law that the United States has helped put in place.
AMY GOODMAN : What were you most surprised by in your research for Torture Team ?
PHILIPPE SANDS : I was most surprised by the total failure of the upper echelons to accept responsibility for the errors that they have made. If I had met these people, if I had met Doug Feith and Jim Haynes, and they had said to me, “Look, we faced in September 2002 a situation in which we felt another attack was coming. We had someone who we felt had information. We authorized techniques of interrogation that were aggressive. They may or may not have crossed the line into torture. With the benefit of hindsight, we realize we fell into error. We made a mistake. We accept responsibility for that, and we need to learn not to do that again” &mdash; that shocked me, and it equally shocked me that they then sought to push the blame of responsibility onto people like Mike Dunlavey and Diane Beaver, people who were doing decent service for the US military and who were unfairly scapegoated. So at the end of the day, it’s not only the crime; it’s the abject failure of individual responsibility to take full account for what they have done. I find that really shocking.
AMY GOODMAN : Philippe Sands, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is Torture Team: Rumsfeld&#8217;s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values . AMYGOODMAN: The House Judiciary Committee is preparing to hold a series of hearings examining the Bush administration’s role in authorizing the illegal torture of prisoners in US custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere. On Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers subpoenaed Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, to testify at a hearing scheduled for June 26th.

Three other former Bush administration officials have already agreed to testify: former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Justice Department attorney John Yoo and former Pentagon official Douglas Feith. Over the past month, more evidence has emerged tying high-ranking Bush administration officials to the use of torture.

In April, ABC News reported Vice President Cheney, former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft all discussed and approved how top al-Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.

President Bush has also confirmed he was aware of these meetings. In an interview with ABC News, Bush said, “We started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people. And yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

Today, we’re joined by British attorney and author, Philippe Sands. He is the author of the new book Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values. On Tuesday, Philippe Sands testified before the House Judiciary Sub-Committee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

PHILIPPESANDS: It’s great to be back, Amy.

AMYGOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Talk about the Conyers subpoena of Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington.

PHILIPPESANDS: Sure. Well, if you remember, we talked about a month ago, after a piece I had written for Vanity Fair came out. That piece, I’m told by Congressman Conyers, catalyzed his committee into focusing on the role of the lawyers, and they began the process of setting up hearings. Yesterday was the first hearing. They’ve issued letters of invitation to all of the lawyers that I’ve written about and several other individuals. All, I understand, have agreed to come voluntarily, with one exception, and that’s Mr. Addington, who was the Vice President’s lawyer at the time, now his chief of staff. He has indicated, however, in a letter of the 1st of May, that if subpoenaed, he would attend, and it is likely that he will now attend next month.

AMYGOODMAN: And what did you raise in your testimony before the congressional subcommittee?

PHILIPPESANDS: Well, I think — I raised a number of issues, but the heart of this story is that the administration has spun a narrative that this was a bottom-up thing, they were simply reacting to requests from people on the ground. And what I’ve discovered, and what was the center of the gravity of what I said to the subcommittee, is that’s a false narrative. It came from the top down. A crime was committed in relation to the detainee that I’m looking at. The Geneva Conventions were violated. He was abused. He was probably, almost certainly, tortured in violation of international law. But the biggest story may well be the cover-up, the spin, that this came from the bottom up, when in fact it was top-down. And that seemed to have resonated with the committee.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about this ABC News revelation about this Principals Committee, all the names that I just gave — you know, Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, George Tenet, Attorney General John Ashcroft — first time senior White House officials linked to an explicit group authorizing the CIA interrogation program, one top official recounting Ashcroft was the lone cabinet member to raise doubts? The official quoted Ashcroft as saying, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

PHILIPPESANDS: I think it’s a very important revelation. Of course, it deals not with the military interrogations that I focused on, but with the CIA interrogations, but they went hand-in-hand, and it’s plain that they were all part and parcel of a decision taken at the top. It confirms my investigation, as a consequence; it’s namely that this came straight from the top.

The significance, of course, of this is that there seems to be a question as to whether the people immediately below the principals knew about this. I was in conversation, for example, a couple of days ago with Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, who expressed —-

AMYGOODMAN: Lawrence Wilkerson?

PHILIPPESANDS: Larry Wilkerson, who -— I asked him, “Were you aware of this?” He said, “Absolutely not.” I asked him, “Did you have any inkling that this was going on? Do you think it could have happened?” And he expressed some considerable surprise. But if the President of the United States says a meeting happened, he knew about it, he approved it, it becomes, I think, a very, very big story, because you’ve got confirmation from the main man, so to speak.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the missing records of Mohammed al-Qahtani.

PHILIPPESANDS: Well, I discovered in the course of meeting — I went around America, was treated with great hospitality and friendship. I spoke to everyone in the decision-making process, from the lawyers down at the bottom, Major General Dunlavey, who was the combatant commander at Guantanamo at the time, and his lawyer Diane Beaver, right up to Jim Haynes, who wrote the memorandum, the famous memorandum in which Mr. Rumsfeld scrolled, “Why is standing limited to four hours? I stand for eight to ten hours a day.”

AMYGOODMAN: Wait, explain that memo. It’s also the cover of your book.

PHILIPPESANDS: It is the cover.

AMYGOODMAN: You’ve got the handwritten note of Donald Rumsfeld. First you see his signature, and then you see this note, “I stand for eight to ten hours a day. Why four hours?”

PHILIPPESANDS: It’s become iconic. What Mr. Rumsfeld did was he authorized fifteen techniques of interrogation, but he wrote at the bottom of the document, “I stand for eight to ten hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?”

That’s been interpreted a number of ways. Was he signaling to the interrogators that the Secretary of Defense was willing for them to go further? Or was it just a jocular comment? I discussed that with a lot of people.

One of the people I met with on a couple of occasions, lengthy conversations, was Mike Dunlavey, the head of interrogations. And right at the end of one of the conversations, he mentioned to me that he had made efforts to go back to get hold of all the documentation to check the computers, to check the record of what had happened, and that there had been, he discovered, what he called a SNAFU, and everything had been lost.

And I think it will be for others now to follow up as to whether the interrogation materials relating to al-Qahtani have suffered the same fate as the interrogation materials of the CIA that, as we now know, were destroyed.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers?

PHILIPPESANDS: I had one lengthy and fascinating conversation with General Myers. I thought he was a decent man of integrity, but out of his depth. And on two issues, I was staggered, so staggered, in fact, that when I came home to London from my trip to the United States, I told my wife what I discovered in conversation with him, which I’m about to share with you, and she was disbelieving — she listened to the tapes — and said absolutely.

There were two points. Firstly, as everyone knows, the President took a decision that none of the detainees at Guantanamo would have any rights under the Geneva Conventions. It seems that General Myers was unaware of that. He was under the impression they had decided that Geneva would apply. So that was a fairly staggering discovery. But it was as nothing compared to the discovery, as we went through the techniques of interrogation one by one, that he had thought that these came out of the US Field Manual guide for interrogations. They were all prohibited. And as we went down the list, his jaw literally dropped. So I got the sense that the most powerful military man in the United States, indeed probably in the world, was blissfully unaware of what had been decided.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re talking to Philippe Sands. His book is Torture Team — it is just out this week — Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values.

I want to ask you about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s recent statement that the torture of prisoners does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Scalia’s comment came during an interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes.

JUSTICEANTONINSCALIA: I don’t like torture. I’m — although defining it is going to be a nice trick. But, I mean, who’s in favor of it? Nobody. And we have a law against torture. But if the — everything that is hateful and odious is not covered by some provision of the Constitution.

LESLEYSTAHL:

If someone’s in custody, as in Abu Ghraib, and they are brutalized by a law enforcement person, if you listen to the expression, “cruel and unusual punishment,” doesn’t that apply?

JUSTICEANTONINSCALIA: No, no.

LESLEYSTAHL: Cruel and unusual punishment?

JUSTICEANTONINSCALIA: To the contrary. You think — you think that you would —- has anybody ever referred to torture as punishment? I don’t think so.

LESLEYSTAHL: Well, I think if you’re in custody and you have a policeman who’s taken you into custody -—

JUSTICEANTONINSCALIA: And you say he’s punishing you?

LESLEYSTAHL: Sure.

JUSTICEANTONINSCALIA: What’s he punishing you for? You punish somebody —-

LESLEYSTAHL: Well, because he assumes you, one, either committed a crime -—

JUSTICEANTONINSCALIA: No, no.

LESLEYSTAHL: — or that you know something that he wants to know.

JUSTICEANTONINSCALIA: Ah, it’s the latter. And when he’s — when he’s —- when he’s hurting you in order to get information from you -—

PHILIPPESANDS: I’m not an expert on US constitutional law. I’ll talk about what I know, which is international law. The US is a party to all of those conventions that prohibit torture. That is a shocking statement by a serving justice, who I know is very partial to the television program 24, along with his colleague Clarence Thomas. It’s -—

AMYGOODMAN: Explain 24.

PHILIPPESANDS: 24 is a television program in which the use of torture is essentially rejoiced in as a technique for producing meaningful information. It had an effect down at Guantanamo. One of the things I discovered in my conversations was that people watched it, people were influenced by it, probably apparently as Antonin Scalia is.

But that is a shocking statement. And I put it in these terms. If he’s going to express that view, that the United States president is free to authorize torture, then why isn’t the Iranian president free to authorize torture against American nationals? Why isn’t the Egyptian president free to organize — authorize torture? The logic of the argument is really surprising and, frankly, outrageous.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Philippe Sands, about the possibility of US officials being charged with war crimes. You were quoted in a New York Times piece on Tuesday: “Mr. Sands, a British law professor, said two foreign prosecutors, whom he did not name, asked him for the materials on which his book Torture Team was based. ‘If the US doesn’t address this,’ he said, ‘other countries will.’"

PHILIPPESANDS: That’s an accurate account, and I describe, in one of the concluding chapters of the book, conversations I had with a European prosecutor and a European judge. And the committee was very interested in that, in relation to a question they asked me and the other witnesses giving testimony: “What should this committee do?” And the answer that I gave was, “Look, it’s not for me to make recommendations on precisely what you do and don’t do, but what needs to happen is the United States needs to get involved in an accounting process. The committee needs to establish the facts. And if the United States doesn’t, others will do it.” And I have no doubt, no doubt whatsoever, that investigations will take place, if they’re not already taking place, and that some of these individuals, if they travel outside the United States, will face a very real threat of investigation.

AMYGOODMAN: And the legality of what President Bush said, or the implications of it, when he said to ABC News, “We started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people. Yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue, and I approved”?

PHILIPPESANDS: Well, it appears to be an admission that the President of the United States authorized torture, that he authorized waterboarding. The convention prohibiting torture, the Geneva Conventions are absolutely clear: there are no circumstances in which torture is permitted. And if the account is accurate, the President is, in effect, owning up to the fact that he has committed a war crime. And under the torture convention, there is an obligation to investigate any person who has committed a war crime. So it was a very surprising admission. I wonder if it was fully thought through. If it’s accurate, it is deeply disturbing.

AMYGOODMAN: Philippe Sands, you talked in your testimony before Congress about torture and what Britain learned in its fight with the IRA, with the Irish Republican Army.

PHILIPPESANDS: In many ways, that was actually the most interesting exchange that I had, because I had it with some seemingly very sensible Republican congressmen, who were very interested and came up and talked to me about that afterwards. What I shared was that the experience of Brits across the political spectrum — it’s not a left-right issue, as I explained — derives from the experience we had in the early 1970s, in which the United Kingdom moved to aggressive interrogation. And they used pretty much the same techniques of interrogation: hooding, stress, humiliation. And it backfired terribly. On all military accounts, it extended the conflict by between fifteen and twenty years, because it creates such resentment in the community that is associated with the people who are being abused that it served to generate further opposition and people moving to violence. So basically the message is: it doesn’t work. And no one in the United Kingdom, literally no one from any of the main political parties or across the political spectrum will in any circumstances support what has been apparently authorized by the President in this country.

AMYGOODMAN: Philippe Sands, I wanted to ask you about a report out of Associated Press. A Kuwaiti freed from Guantanamo Bay carried out a suicide car bombing recently in Iraq — the US military said this on Wednesday, confirming what’s believed to be the first such attack by a former detainee at Guantanamo. Tom Wilner, al-Ajmi’s American lawyer, said incarceration at Guantanamo may have turned the Kuwaiti into a terrorist. Wilner said, quote, "I don’t know whether the experience of being kept down there in isolation radicalized him."

PHILIPPESANDS: I read that report, and I was — this morning — and I was disturbed by that report. I mean, I find that the whole system that has been created at Guantanamo is abhorrent. It doesn’t meet minimum international standards. It sends out a terrible signal to the rest of the world. Most of the people, I think, being held at Guantanamo are really not seriously problematic people. But undoubtedly, there are some problematic people, and steps do need to be taken in order to protect countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.
<P.That said, I immediately, reading the article, asked myself the question: is this individual someone who fell into that small category of persons who was, as Donald Rumsfeld put it, a seriously bad person? We don’t know that. And there is the possibility that the treatment that he was subjected to gave rise to an IRA type of situation, that it so enraged him, that it so enraged his community, that it essentially politicized him and energized him. Of course, we don’t know the facts, and I think we need to find out a lot more about the facts before expressing a final view.

AMYGOODMAN: You live in Britain. Your book is Torture Team, though, about the United States and international law. The people involved that you’re talking about go across the gamut, now a number out of office. You have John Yoo, for example, who’s a law professor at University of California, Berkeley. You have Douglas Feith, who’s now teaching at Georgetown. What are your thoughts about this?

PHILIPPESANDS: John Yoo’s dean at Berkeley has been subject to intense criticism for not firing him, and indeed there was even an op-ed, an opinion, an editorial, in the New York Times, saying he basically shouldn’t be teaching there anymore. Dean Edley wrote an interesting letter, in which he said, look, there’s freedom of expression, that includes freedom of views, and under the rules at Berkeley, you can only fire someone if they’ve been convicted in a court of law of committing a criminal offense. And John Yoo has not been convicted of committing a criminal offense. And in our system, you are innocent until proven guilty.

I’ve laid out the reasons why I believe John Yoo has participated in authorizing torture, and that exposes him to investigation. But I entirely accept that until he is actually condemned by a court of law, he is perfectly entitled to carry on peddling views, even if I violently and fundamentally disagree with those views.

As regards Doug Feith, I spent time with him. He’s an entertaining character, but he’s a scary character. I’ve read his book, 900 pages on war and decision, five pages devoted to the issue of interrogations. And you read that book, and you have no idea that this man was deeply involved in the decisions that I write about. It’s spin. It’s whitewash. There’s a failure to accept responsibility. And that, I think, is what is going to cause them in difficulty, because it’s essentially a cover-up.

AMYGOODMAN: We invited Douglas Feith on the show, but we didn’t get a response. Can you talk about the significance of the 1947 case, United States of America v. Josef Altstoetter?

PHILIPPESANDS: It ‘s a delicate case. It’s one of the cases known as the Justice Cases, the only time that lawyers have ever been convicted of international crimes for carrying out their professional activities.

AMYGOODMAN: Lawyers?

PHILIPPESANDS: Lawyers. The focus was on lawyers. I included reference to that case in my book, because I found it ironic that the theory that lawyers could cross a line and be investigated, prosecuted, and convicted for committing international crimes was a theory that was drawn up by the United States military itself, and then we come full-circle sixty years on, and we find that, with Mr. Rumsfeld’s hand, abuse is authorized and permitted by the US military in plain violation of international rules, but also in plain violation of President Lincoln’s disposition, going back to 1863, that the US doesn’t do cruelty.

But the case is an important one. It’s not a bang-on point, and I’m absolutely not drawing analogies. I’m not saying that these lawyers are equivalent to those lawyers or this regime is equivalent to that regime. What I’m interested in is the circumstance, in when does a lawyer cross a line into criminality?

And coming back to an earlier question that you raised, the European judge and the European prosecutor that I met, when I laid out all the materials for them, they came back with a most startling conclusion. They said, “Philippe, the bottom line of it is, there is no distinction between the man or woman who interrogates and the man or woman who authorizes by law an abusive interrogation. They are both subject to investigation. They are both subject to prosecution.” And I think that’s the way the law has gone, and it’s a law that is right, and it is a law that the United States has helped put in place.

AMYGOODMAN: What were you most surprised by in your research for Torture Team?

PHILIPPESANDS: I was most surprised by the total failure of the upper echelons to accept responsibility for the errors that they have made. If I had met these people, if I had met Doug Feith and Jim Haynes, and they had said to me, “Look, we faced in September 2002 a situation in which we felt another attack was coming. We had someone who we felt had information. We authorized techniques of interrogation that were aggressive. They may or may not have crossed the line into torture. With the benefit of hindsight, we realize we fell into error. We made a mistake. We accept responsibility for that, and we need to learn not to do that again” — that shocked me, and it equally shocked me that they then sought to push the blame of responsibility onto people like Mike Dunlavey and Diane Beaver, people who were doing decent service for the US military and who were unfairly scapegoated. So at the end of the day, it’s not only the crime; it’s the abject failure of individual responsibility to take full account for what they have done. I find that really shocking.

AMYGOODMAN: Philippe Sands, I want to thank you for being with us. His book is Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values.

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Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400CorpWatch’s Pratap Chatterjee and Ex-Titan Translator Marwan Mawiri on Corporate Cronyism and Intelligence Outsourcing in Iraqhttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/30/corpwatchs_pratap_chatterjee_and_ex_titan
tag:democracynow.org,2008-04-30:en/story/d2676e JUAN GONZALEZ : A Senate Democratic committee heard testimony Monday alleging fraud and waste by the Pentagon’s largest contractor in Iraq, Kellogg Brown and Root, or KBR . KBR denied all the allegations. It used to be a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Committee Chair Senator Byron Dorgan from North Dakota has scheduled more hearings on wasted government money and said that “in cost-plus contracts, waste doesn’t matter to contractors.” He added that in recent years he had seen “the greatest waste fraud and abuse this country has ever witnessed.”
KBR has a $27 billion logistics contract with the US Army as the sole provider of services to troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world. Earlier this month, the US Army awarded KBR an additional $150 million ten-year contract.
Meanwhile, another lesser-known defense contractor, L-3, held its annual shareholder meeting in New York yesterday. L-3 specializes in intelligence gathering in Iraq and is the second largest employer in Iraq after KBR . Created in part by Wall Street investment bankers working for Lehman Brothers, L-3 is now the parent company to firms like Titan, which provided translators at Abu Ghraib.
The watchdog group CorpWatch released a scathing report yesterday about L-3 and Titan. It’s called “Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq.”
Pratap Chatterjee is the managing editor of CorpWatch and the author of this report. He just returned from Iraq, where he was embedded with the US military and investigating the outsourcing of both military logistics and intelligence gathering. He joins us now here in the firehouse studio in New York.
We’re also joined by Marwan Mawiri. He worked as a translator with Titan in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
Welcome, both of you, to Democracy Now!
PRATAP CHATTERJEE : Juan, thank you for having us.
MARWAN MAWIRI : Thank you.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Let&#8217;s start first with KBR and its alleged abuses. You’re very familiar with that topic.
PRATAP CHATTERJEE : I’m very familiar with that, Juan, yes. And this is my fourth trip to Iraq, and this time I was embedded with the 316th Expeditionary Sustainment Command and Battalion up in Anaconda and down in Camp Arifjan with the 1st Theater Sustainment Command. And what I discovered was a culture of excess, and it’s interesting. It’s different from what I thought. Basically, the idea of the military here is to provide as much as possible to the troops so that they have sort of a hometown experience. We’re talking about Southern comfort food. You have some menus here, you know, an Easter menu, an Indian night menu. You know, soldiers are provided with, you know, bacon, pork loin, jellybeans, waffle bars.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Yeah, it says here, “the Happy Easter menu.” Cornish &mdash; entrees: Cornish hen, prime rib, sliced ham, roasted turkey and grilled trout. Side dishes: shrimp cocktail, macaroni and cheese, candied yams, mashed potatoes. Sounds like a good menu.
PRATAP CHATTERJEE : So this is not &mdash; yeah, it’s a pretty good menu. And the idea really is, when soldiers are there, is they get provided with good food, as much of it as they want. They get food four times a day. They have internet. They have video games they can play. The idea is to remove them from the reality of Iraq and to make them feel at home. And we were talking to a young soldier from Mississippi, and he said, “Reading the media, you know, I thought this was a lot more dangerous place.”
Now remember, out of the 160,000 troops, we had 100,000 stay on the bases. And they are really not &mdash; we talked to a soldier, and we said, “Well, what do you &mdash; how do you communicate with Iraqis?” And he said, “Well, you know, the Iraqis on the base, they’re pretty happy.” And I’m like, “But there aren’t any Iraqis on the base. The people you’re meeting on the base are Indian.” And this food is provided, you know, to the troops by Indian workers who are paid, if they’re cleaners, $9 a day; if they’re cooks, $20 a day; if you’re a cashier, $30 a day. And it’s driven in by Fijian truck drivers. And I spent some time hanging out with Fijian truck drivers in Kuwait. These guys have driven a hundred trips to Iraq, from Kuwait City to Mosul, to Anaconda, to places around there, and they&#8217;re paid $180 a trip. So the very fact that there are beans and bullets in Iraq is a result of, you know, third world workers providing this stuff to troops.
The troops now, when they live there, have &mdash; if you&#8217;re not on the frontlines, the idea is to keep you there and to make you happy, because, remember, a lot of the troops are there, you know, at great cost to themselves and because they need to make a living. The problem is, this creates a culture of excess.
So, in a sense &mdash; I met with Colonel Moreland at &mdash; and Colonel Carol at the 1st Sustainment Command down in Kuwait, and I said, “Look, I have evidence of contractors who have been involved in multi-billion-dollar fraud. I have evidence that the truck drivers and the workers are not being paid well. Will you do something about this?” And they said, “No. The contract works. The troops are fed.”
So here’s the problem, is you can’t even give KBR a slap on the wrist, because they know they can get away with things. In 2004, there was a trucking contract with a company called PWC from Kuwait. They’re driving things into Iraq, and they have hired drivers who are not competent, who can’t drive these trucks. And the military says, “We’re not going to change anything. We know this was true.” Colonel Moreland himself said, “There was a problem the first year.” I said, “Well, why didn’t you do something about it?” He says, “Because, you know, we’re at war.” I mean, this is the reality. And this is why KBR knows it can get away with workers &mdash; particularly management, with charging a lot. It really is a culture of excess.
JUAN GONZALEZ : But now, there have been, I don’t know how many, investigations of contractor abuse in Iraq, congressional hearings, GAO reports. Nothing seems to change.
PRATAP CHATTERJEE : Well, I mean, you mentioned it yourself, Juan. This is a company that’s probably gotten $25 billion worth of contracts. Its new contract is $150 billion over the next ten years. This is a lot of money. And the reality is, there are companies who can do &mdash; KBR , for example, in doing this work, is subcontracting it to a lot of other companies, to Kulak from Turkey, to Tamimi from Saudi Arabia, to Prime Projects International from Dubai. Now, I’m not suggesting that these companies are much better, because given half a chance, they would overcharge, too, and they definitely exploit their workers, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Egyptians, the Sri Lankans.
Now, the Marines actually did an interesting experiment in Djibouti at Camp Lemonier where they decided to get rid of KBR and hire instead the company they were subcontracting, and they saved a bunch of money. The Army Corps of Engineers, in reconstructing Iraq, has decided that companies like Parsons, companies like Bechtel, companies like ECCI , all from California, are not doing a good job, so they’ve directly hired the Iraqi companies. It’s much safer, and it puts more money back into the economy. And the GRD , the Gulf Regional Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers &mdash; I met with them in Baghdad &mdash; they said, “We&#8217;re seeing much better work done, because we&#8217;re working directly with the local people.”
JUAN GONZALEZ : Now, tell us about this new company, L-3, the subject of your report, “Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq.”
PRATAP CHATTERJEE : Well, Juan, this is a company that had a multi-billion-dollar contract to provide translators, translators like Marwan here, to work in the field and provide that critical nexus between soldiers and between the local Iraqi population. Most recently, about three years ago, they got a $426.5 million contract to provide intelligence, analysts, screeners, interrogators in Iraq.
Now, the problem the military has is they’re hiring a company for intelligence that’s either not very clever or they’re deaf. They’re deaf to the needs of their translators, who are getting injured. This is &mdash; 280 translators have died. This is a rate 50 percent higher than the military itself.
JUAN GONZALEZ : By “died,” you mean “have been killed.”
PRATAP CHATTERJEE : Have been killed in Iraq, mostly Iraqi nationals. They are not listening to soldiers, who want to be able to communicate and find out what’s happening in Iraq, and they&#8217;re most certainly not listening to Iraqis, who are being thrown in &mdash; there are 25,000 prisoners in Iraq.
And because a lot of these translators, you know, either don’t speak very good English or very good Arabic, what happens is there&#8217;s a communication gap. I’ll give you an example. Three weeks ago, I was in a camp &mdash; I won’t name where &mdash; in Iraq, where I met a Titan translator, and we were listening to mortar fire outside. And I said to the translator, I said, “How do you say ‘There’s incoming mortar fire’ in Arabic?” And this look of panic descended upon him, because he couldn’t translate that, and he rushed off to find someone to find out how to say “incoming mortar fire.”
We have a problem here. Bad intelligence costs lives. And that’s really what you&#8217;re getting from L-3. I mean &mdash; and in fact, the US military has &mdash; it took them nine years to do it, but they yanked 80 percent of the new contract for translation, a $4.6 billion contract. Unfortunately, 20 percent of the contract still remains with a company, this joint venture with DynCorp, who is supposed to be their rival. So these companies sort of stitch it up. They work with each other.
Yesterday, when I was at their annual meeting, I ran into the four-star General Carl Vuono, who runs their military training program. I said, “General, aren’t you worried that you are doing a bad job by the military?” I mean, these guys were fired from training the Iraqi army in Kirkuk &mdash; in Kirkush, rather, in 2004.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Marwan Mawiri, you were recruited to be &mdash; to work for L-3. Could you tell us about your experience, how you got involved and what your duties were there?
MARWAN MAWIRI : Well, what happened is that Titan, back in 2002, 2003, started putting these ads that they’re looking for qualified linguists to come out and help in providing services to the US government and Department of Defense.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And these ads were in Iraq or here?
MARWAN MAWIRI : No, US nationals, US citizens and green card holder. I’m a US citizen, so I responded to the ad, and I called the company. I said I was interested in this job, “What do I need to do?”
And it was a very simple conversation for less than a minute. In less than a minute’s conversation, my Arabic language skill was tested, my English language skill was tested, and I passed. And that was the case with hundreds of hired in &mdash; or that were hired in the US.
And when we got to Washington, D.C., and we started going through the hiring process, you know, I was shocked and surprised that many of the people they hired inside the United States, if you were just to give them a simple Arabic language test or an English language test to see how proficient they are in translations, they will not pass. I mean, we literally had people who needed help filling out their employment application. We needed &mdash;- you know, I was helping some of the people they hired to fill out their, you know, background investigation application.
And when we got, you know, to the field and when we got deployed to our assignments, you know, I was surprised that we never had any training, even before we took on these assignments, nor we got training when we get to our field. And we had to deal with, you know, incompetent -&mdash;
JUAN GONZALEZ : No training about what to expect in Iraq?
MARWAN MAWIRI : No training what to expect in Iraq. No training what the field work going to look like. No training on how you should be translating in a proper manner. No training even how to deal with simple things when it comes to, you know, what if you had issues and problems, you know &mdash; and what was most shocking is, even the site manager or the so-called site manager they had, you know, in the field, were unskilled, unqualified. I mean, some of these people literally had no experience even in managing more than three, four, five people. One of the site managers we dealt with was a truck driver. One of the site managers that we dealt was &mdash; I think his rank was a sergeant, who probably handled a handful of soldiers before he &mdash;-
JUAN GONZALEZ : And what were you paid by them?
MARWAN MAWIRI : At the time, the pay range was between $60,000 to $100,000.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And once you were deployed in Iraq, what did you do?
MARWAN MAWIRI : I provided translation and language services to the Army. I was attached with Brigade 173rd out of Italy, Airborne, and I was stationed in Kirkuk and the surrounding areas. And I helped out in a lot of efforts in reconstruction that, you know, the government reestablish social order. I also helped out and established, with the help of Battalion 108, which is a branch of 173rd Airborne, in establishing the first police academy after the invasion. And we were able to train, you know, approximately 2,000 to 3,000 police officers and Iraqi Defense Forces and trying to get them ready to handle their own, you know -&mdash;
JUAN GONZALEZ : And the degree of danger, obviously &mdash; some 200 translators were killed from the company &mdash; because you were obviously exposed to the same kind of dangers that a lot of the troops were, right?
MARWAN MAWIRI : Yes. We were frontline translators. We were embedded with the soldiers. Wherever the soldiers went, we went. Whether it was, you know, a civil affair mission or a, you know, 3:00 in the morning mission raid or, you know, I mean, we were there, we were taking bullets. You know, we were with the soldiers, so wherever the soldier went, we went. And, you know, what was so amazing, that the company has promised that they will provide us with body armors, they will provide us with special uniforms that will keep us protected, but that never happened.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And Pratap, what kind of oversight for a company like L-3 or Titan has occurred so far?
PRATAP CHATTERJEE : Well, there’s very little oversight, and this is a question we’ve been asking the military for a long time. And literally, the contract ended &mdash; the original Titan translation contract ended in 2004. It’s taken four years to get them out of place and move another company. So it’s very hard. I mean, the problem here is that bad contracting, and because there’s poor oversight, costs lives. And more than that, it costs &mdash; I mean, not more than that, but equally, it costs a lot of dollars, a lot of taxpayer dollars. And you &mdash; it is not good for Iraqis or for Americans to have companies that don’t listen to their client, the military, or to us, the taxpayer.
JUAN GONZALEZ : And in terms of &mdash; have you talked to Congress, members of Congress, about this at all?
PRATAP CHATTERJEE : Absolutely. A lot of &mdash; I know that the Democratic Policy Committee, for example, in the Senate, which you mentioned, had hearings. They are planning to look into this issue of L-3 and Titan, the fact that the company is providing screeners who are in charge of finding out who gets onto the base and who doesn’t, whose experience is working at a Safeway checkout counter. You know, these are the people we’re putting to decide whether or not &mdash; no experience in screening, except maybe working as a baggage screener at an airport. It’s a problem.
JUAN GONZALEZ : Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Pratap Chatterjee, investigative journalist, author and managing editor of CorpWatch, released a report yesterday called “Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq.” And Marwan Mawiri worked as a translator with Titan in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.JUANGONZALEZ: A Senate Democratic committee heard testimony Monday alleging fraud and waste by the Pentagon’s largest contractor in Iraq, Kellogg Brown and Root, or KBR. KBR denied all the allegations. It used to be a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Committee Chair Senator Byron Dorgan from North Dakota has scheduled more hearings on wasted government money and said that “in cost-plus contracts, waste doesn’t matter to contractors.” He added that in recent years he had seen “the greatest waste fraud and abuse this country has ever witnessed.”

KBR has a $27 billion logistics contract with the US Army as the sole provider of services to troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and other parts of the world. Earlier this month, the US Army awarded KBR an additional $150 million ten-year contract.

Meanwhile, another lesser-known defense contractor, L-3, held its annual shareholder meeting in New York yesterday. L-3 specializes in intelligence gathering in Iraq and is the second largest employer in Iraq after KBR. Created in part by Wall Street investment bankers working for Lehman Brothers, L-3 is now the parent company to firms like Titan, which provided translators at Abu Ghraib.

The watchdog group CorpWatch released a scathing report yesterday about L-3 and Titan. It’s called “Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq.”

Pratap Chatterjee is the managing editor of CorpWatch and the author of this report. He just returned from Iraq, where he was embedded with the US military and investigating the outsourcing of both military logistics and intelligence gathering. He joins us now here in the firehouse studio in New York.

We’re also joined by Marwan Mawiri. He worked as a translator with Titan in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

Welcome, both of you, to Democracy Now!

PRATAPCHATTERJEE: Juan, thank you for having us.

MARWANMAWIRI: Thank you.

JUANGONZALEZ: Let’s start first with KBR and its alleged abuses. You’re very familiar with that topic.

PRATAPCHATTERJEE: I’m very familiar with that, Juan, yes. And this is my fourth trip to Iraq, and this time I was embedded with the 316th Expeditionary Sustainment Command and Battalion up in Anaconda and down in Camp Arifjan with the 1st Theater Sustainment Command. And what I discovered was a culture of excess, and it’s interesting. It’s different from what I thought. Basically, the idea of the military here is to provide as much as possible to the troops so that they have sort of a hometown experience. We’re talking about Southern comfort food. You have some menus here, you know, an Easter menu, an Indian night menu. You know, soldiers are provided with, you know, bacon, pork loin, jellybeans, waffle bars.

PRATAPCHATTERJEE: So this is not — yeah, it’s a pretty good menu. And the idea really is, when soldiers are there, is they get provided with good food, as much of it as they want. They get food four times a day. They have internet. They have video games they can play. The idea is to remove them from the reality of Iraq and to make them feel at home. And we were talking to a young soldier from Mississippi, and he said, “Reading the media, you know, I thought this was a lot more dangerous place.”

Now remember, out of the 160,000 troops, we had 100,000 stay on the bases. And they are really not — we talked to a soldier, and we said, “Well, what do you — how do you communicate with Iraqis?” And he said, “Well, you know, the Iraqis on the base, they’re pretty happy.” And I’m like, “But there aren’t any Iraqis on the base. The people you’re meeting on the base are Indian.” And this food is provided, you know, to the troops by Indian workers who are paid, if they’re cleaners, $9 a day; if they’re cooks, $20 a day; if you’re a cashier, $30 a day. And it’s driven in by Fijian truck drivers. And I spent some time hanging out with Fijian truck drivers in Kuwait. These guys have driven a hundred trips to Iraq, from Kuwait City to Mosul, to Anaconda, to places around there, and they’re paid $180 a trip. So the very fact that there are beans and bullets in Iraq is a result of, you know, third world workers providing this stuff to troops.

The troops now, when they live there, have — if you’re not on the frontlines, the idea is to keep you there and to make you happy, because, remember, a lot of the troops are there, you know, at great cost to themselves and because they need to make a living. The problem is, this creates a culture of excess.

So, in a sense — I met with Colonel Moreland at — and Colonel Carol at the 1st Sustainment Command down in Kuwait, and I said, “Look, I have evidence of contractors who have been involved in multi-billion-dollar fraud. I have evidence that the truck drivers and the workers are not being paid well. Will you do something about this?” And they said, “No. The contract works. The troops are fed.”

So here’s the problem, is you can’t even give KBR a slap on the wrist, because they know they can get away with things. In 2004, there was a trucking contract with a company called PWC from Kuwait. They’re driving things into Iraq, and they have hired drivers who are not competent, who can’t drive these trucks. And the military says, “We’re not going to change anything. We know this was true.” Colonel Moreland himself said, “There was a problem the first year.” I said, “Well, why didn’t you do something about it?” He says, “Because, you know, we’re at war.” I mean, this is the reality. And this is why KBR knows it can get away with workers — particularly management, with charging a lot. It really is a culture of excess.

JUANGONZALEZ: But now, there have been, I don’t know how many, investigations of contractor abuse in Iraq, congressional hearings, GAO reports. Nothing seems to change.

PRATAPCHATTERJEE: Well, I mean, you mentioned it yourself, Juan. This is a company that’s probably gotten $25 billion worth of contracts. Its new contract is $150 billion over the next ten years. This is a lot of money. And the reality is, there are companies who can do — KBR, for example, in doing this work, is subcontracting it to a lot of other companies, to Kulak from Turkey, to Tamimi from Saudi Arabia, to Prime Projects International from Dubai. Now, I’m not suggesting that these companies are much better, because given half a chance, they would overcharge, too, and they definitely exploit their workers, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Egyptians, the Sri Lankans.

Now, the Marines actually did an interesting experiment in Djibouti at Camp Lemonier where they decided to get rid of KBR and hire instead the company they were subcontracting, and they saved a bunch of money. The Army Corps of Engineers, in reconstructing Iraq, has decided that companies like Parsons, companies like Bechtel, companies like ECCI, all from California, are not doing a good job, so they’ve directly hired the Iraqi companies. It’s much safer, and it puts more money back into the economy. And the GRD, the Gulf Regional Division of the US Army Corps of Engineers — I met with them in Baghdad — they said, “We’re seeing much better work done, because we’re working directly with the local people.”

JUANGONZALEZ: Now, tell us about this new company, L-3, the subject of your report, “Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq.”

PRATAPCHATTERJEE: Well, Juan, this is a company that had a multi-billion-dollar contract to provide translators, translators like Marwan here, to work in the field and provide that critical nexus between soldiers and between the local Iraqi population. Most recently, about three years ago, they got a $426.5 million contract to provide intelligence, analysts, screeners, interrogators in Iraq.

Now, the problem the military has is they’re hiring a company for intelligence that’s either not very clever or they’re deaf. They’re deaf to the needs of their translators, who are getting injured. This is — 280 translators have died. This is a rate 50 percent higher than the military itself.

JUANGONZALEZ: By “died,” you mean “have been killed.”

PRATAPCHATTERJEE: Have been killed in Iraq, mostly Iraqi nationals. They are not listening to soldiers, who want to be able to communicate and find out what’s happening in Iraq, and they’re most certainly not listening to Iraqis, who are being thrown in — there are 25,000 prisoners in Iraq.

And because a lot of these translators, you know, either don’t speak very good English or very good Arabic, what happens is there’s a communication gap. I’ll give you an example. Three weeks ago, I was in a camp — I won’t name where — in Iraq, where I met a Titan translator, and we were listening to mortar fire outside. And I said to the translator, I said, “How do you say ‘There’s incoming mortar fire’ in Arabic?” And this look of panic descended upon him, because he couldn’t translate that, and he rushed off to find someone to find out how to say “incoming mortar fire.”

We have a problem here. Bad intelligence costs lives. And that’s really what you’re getting from L-3. I mean — and in fact, the US military has — it took them nine years to do it, but they yanked 80 percent of the new contract for translation, a $4.6 billion contract. Unfortunately, 20 percent of the contract still remains with a company, this joint venture with DynCorp, who is supposed to be their rival. So these companies sort of stitch it up. They work with each other.

Yesterday, when I was at their annual meeting, I ran into the four-star General Carl Vuono, who runs their military training program. I said, “General, aren’t you worried that you are doing a bad job by the military?” I mean, these guys were fired from training the Iraqi army in Kirkuk — in Kirkush, rather, in 2004.

JUANGONZALEZ: Marwan Mawiri, you were recruited to be — to work for L-3. Could you tell us about your experience, how you got involved and what your duties were there?

MARWANMAWIRI: Well, what happened is that Titan, back in 2002, 2003, started putting these ads that they’re looking for qualified linguists to come out and help in providing services to the US government and Department of Defense.

JUANGONZALEZ: And these ads were in Iraq or here?

MARWANMAWIRI: No, US nationals, US citizens and green card holder. I’m a US citizen, so I responded to the ad, and I called the company. I said I was interested in this job, “What do I need to do?”

And it was a very simple conversation for less than a minute. In less than a minute’s conversation, my Arabic language skill was tested, my English language skill was tested, and I passed. And that was the case with hundreds of hired in — or that were hired in the US.

And when we got to Washington, D.C., and we started going through the hiring process, you know, I was shocked and surprised that many of the people they hired inside the United States, if you were just to give them a simple Arabic language test or an English language test to see how proficient they are in translations, they will not pass. I mean, we literally had people who needed help filling out their employment application. We needed —- you know, I was helping some of the people they hired to fill out their, you know, background investigation application.

And when we got, you know, to the field and when we got deployed to our assignments, you know, I was surprised that we never had any training, even before we took on these assignments, nor we got training when we get to our field. And we had to deal with, you know, incompetent -—

JUANGONZALEZ: No training about what to expect in Iraq?

MARWANMAWIRI: No training what to expect in Iraq. No training what the field work going to look like. No training on how you should be translating in a proper manner. No training even how to deal with simple things when it comes to, you know, what if you had issues and problems, you know — and what was most shocking is, even the site manager or the so-called site manager they had, you know, in the field, were unskilled, unqualified. I mean, some of these people literally had no experience even in managing more than three, four, five people. One of the site managers we dealt with was a truck driver. One of the site managers that we dealt was — I think his rank was a sergeant, who probably handled a handful of soldiers before he —-

JUANGONZALEZ: And what were you paid by them?

MARWANMAWIRI: At the time, the pay range was between $60,000 to $100,000.

JUANGONZALEZ: And once you were deployed in Iraq, what did you do?

MARWANMAWIRI: I provided translation and language services to the Army. I was attached with Brigade 173rd out of Italy, Airborne, and I was stationed in Kirkuk and the surrounding areas. And I helped out in a lot of efforts in reconstruction that, you know, the government reestablish social order. I also helped out and established, with the help of Battalion 108, which is a branch of 173rd Airborne, in establishing the first police academy after the invasion. And we were able to train, you know, approximately 2,000 to 3,000 police officers and Iraqi Defense Forces and trying to get them ready to handle their own, you know -—

JUANGONZALEZ: And the degree of danger, obviously — some 200 translators were killed from the company — because you were obviously exposed to the same kind of dangers that a lot of the troops were, right?

MARWANMAWIRI: Yes. We were frontline translators. We were embedded with the soldiers. Wherever the soldiers went, we went. Whether it was, you know, a civil affair mission or a, you know, 3:00 in the morning mission raid or, you know, I mean, we were there, we were taking bullets. You know, we were with the soldiers, so wherever the soldier went, we went. And, you know, what was so amazing, that the company has promised that they will provide us with body armors, they will provide us with special uniforms that will keep us protected, but that never happened.

JUANGONZALEZ: And Pratap, what kind of oversight for a company like L-3 or Titan has occurred so far?

PRATAPCHATTERJEE: Well, there’s very little oversight, and this is a question we’ve been asking the military for a long time. And literally, the contract ended — the original Titan translation contract ended in 2004. It’s taken four years to get them out of place and move another company. So it’s very hard. I mean, the problem here is that bad contracting, and because there’s poor oversight, costs lives. And more than that, it costs — I mean, not more than that, but equally, it costs a lot of dollars, a lot of taxpayer dollars. And you — it is not good for Iraqis or for Americans to have companies that don’t listen to their client, the military, or to us, the taxpayer.

JUANGONZALEZ: And in terms of — have you talked to Congress, members of Congress, about this at all?

PRATAPCHATTERJEE: Absolutely. A lot of — I know that the Democratic Policy Committee, for example, in the Senate, which you mentioned, had hearings. They are planning to look into this issue of L-3 and Titan, the fact that the company is providing screeners who are in charge of finding out who gets onto the base and who doesn’t, whose experience is working at a Safeway checkout counter. You know, these are the people we’re putting to decide whether or not — no experience in screening, except maybe working as a baggage screener at an airport. It’s a problem.

JUANGONZALEZ: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Pratap Chatterjee, investigative journalist, author and managing editor of CorpWatch, released a report yesterday called “Outsourcing Intelligence in Iraq.” And Marwan Mawiri worked as a translator with Titan in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.]]>

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400Broadcast Exclusive: Abu Ghraib Whistleblower Samuel Provance Speaks Out on Torture and Cover-Uphttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/25/broadcast_exclusive_abu_ghraib_whistleblower_samuel
tag:democracynow.org,2008-01-25:en/story/5cccd2 AMY GOODMAN : Four years ago this week, the Army launched its first investigation into allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. This investigation by Army Major General Antonio Taguba, along with photos leaked by the media, eventually helped expose the widespread abuse and torture taking place inside the US-run jail.
In the four years since Taguba began his investigation, not one officer or civilian leader has been held criminally responsible for the abuses. Last month, the US Army threw out the conviction of the only officer court-martialed in the torture scandal. Meanwhile, several soldiers who helped expose the torture have been punished.
Today, we spend the hour with Abu Ghraib whistleblower and former Army sergeant, Samuel Provance. From September 2003 to the spring of 2004, Provance ran the top-secret computer network used by Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib. He was the first intelligence specialist to speak openly about abuse at the prison and is the only Military Intelligence soldier listed as a witness in the Taguba report.
When Provance defied an order not to speak to the media about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the Army stripped him of his security clearance, demoted him in rank and threatened him with ten years in jail. Eventually, Samuel Provance was forced to leave the armed forces. When we spoke to him late last year, Samuel Provance was struggling to find a job and was working as a private security guard at a mall.
I began by asking him how he learned of the abuses taking place inside Abu Ghraib.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, I was really intrigued by the interrogators, and I was just curious as to exactly what was it like in the day &mdash; you know, a day in the life of an interrogator. So I would just ask them, you know, questions, because, you know, my job allowed me to kind of float among the premises, because I was just, for the most part, helping people whenever they had problems after the network had been set up and maintained. So I would just ask questions here and there, you know, from different people, like, you know, exactly what goes on in interrogation or what kind of people do you interrogate, what are some of the things that go on, you know, things of that nature or just being somewhere listening to somebody talking about an interrogation.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the information you started to gather, the people you started to meet.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, first of all, there was the interrogators. And originally it was just a handful of people. You know, it was the 519th and the 325th, which were half-active and half-reservist. And then, there was a big difference between Camp Victory, because at Camp Victory everybody was kind of dog-eat-dog, whereas at Abu Ghraib, people were more like family, and, you know, it was very &mdash; the people were very bonded. But it was completely different.
And, you know, I would ask questions about interrogations and stuff, and the things they started telling me were alarming, you know, beginning with the nudity. You know, one girl was an interrogator just out of the schoolhouse, a reservist, nineteen years old, and she was telling me about, you know, interrogating somebody in the nude. And, you know, I’m thinking, even me, as a man, would have some reservation about doing something like that, or, you know, if I could do that. But here she is, a nineteen-year-old girl, you know, interrogating a naked prisoner. But she talked about it without batting an eye, you know, like it wasn’t an issue for her.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you challenge her about it?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, yeah, I would &mdash; there were several times I would try to talk to them about what was going on there ethically, but, you know, they would always brush me off, you know, because I was the computer guy or an analyst. You know, “What do you really know?” And, you know, for me, it was like I don’t know the legality of everything, but just because I’m against it doesn’t mean it’s illegal.
AMY GOODMAN : Sam Provance, can you talk about the difference between the people who were originally there, the MI soldiers, Military Intelligence, and then those who were brought in from Guantanamo, and how things changed?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : There was an incredible difference. The people from Guantanamo Bay came in as the experts, as the fixers, you know, that Abu Ghraib was a problem, that they weren’t getting enough product from, and the people from Gitmo were there to fix this problem and to show them how it’s really done.
AMY GOODMAN : Who were these Gitmo soldiers?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Specifically, I really don’t know. I just know they were from Gitmo. They let you know they were from Gitmo. And, you know, they were very arrogant. And they didn’t &mdash; you know, there was a big fight between the old school and the new school, and, you know, the new school won.
AMY GOODMAN : You were trained at Fort Huachuca?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Where is that?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : That’s in Arizona.
AMY GOODMAN : And what were you trained to do? What did you understand was proper, and what wasn’t?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, I was trained to be an intelligence analyst. And, you know, you’re kind of &mdash; you get acquainted with the different sources of intelligence or how they gather, you know, different types of intelligence, whether it’s, you know, electronic or human, you know, whatever the case may be. And then there&#8217;s a small section where they actually go into human intelligence. And basically, you know, it’s just about &mdash; you know, what I got &mdash; what I was acquainted with was, you know, what’s considered like the rapport system, which is, you know, getting a person to tell their story so that they&#8217;re not actually resisting, they&#8217;re cooperating.
AMY GOODMAN : You say the Guantanamo people had very different ideas.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, you had Guantanamo soldiers, but you also had an increase in the number of civilian contractors. Who were they? Where were they from? What companies?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, they would tell you where they were from or who they worked for, but you really didn’t know if they were telling the truth. You know, the whole place was very mysterious, and you didn’t &mdash; you know, somebody could tell you they were from CACI or they were from Titan, but you didn’t know if they were from actually the other or if they might have actually been CIA or FBI or any other. And then there was also the prospect of spies.
AMY GOODMAN : Spies?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, of course. I mean, anytime you&#8217;re dealing with intelligence, there&#8217;s always the possibility of there being a spy.
AMY GOODMAN : Spy for...?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Who knows?
AMY GOODMAN : So these guys from CACI or Titan, or how they identified themselves, were interrogators, translators, linguists?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right. Some of them were actually foreign. And the one thing I noticed about the majority of the foreign linguists and interpreters were that they hated the Iraqi people.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you elaborate?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, anytime you just had a conversation with them, they just had no remorse or no sympathy for what was going on in Iraq. And anytime I would bring up, you know, the question of what was being done to the prisoners, whether it was their being wrongfully detained because they&#8217;re completely innocent and/or being abused, tortured, maybe even killed, and they just &mdash; you know, it was something they didn’t care and were glad about, if anything.
AMY GOODMAN : So, your job was, as you’ve described it, making accounts for new users, troubleshooting computer problems, backing up the secret shared drive, maintaining secret and top-secret network connectivity, manning the top-secret part of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, JIDC . What were you learning? Tell us more about the conversations that you were having, where you were allowed to go in the prison, where you were not allowed to go.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : There really wasn’t anywhere I couldn’t go, but there was a lot of places you just didn’t want to go, because you didn’t want to know what was going on. You know, in the intelligence world, you know, you&#8217;re really held accountable for the things that you learn, so there’s a lot of things you really don’t want to know, even if you could know them. One of those was the &mdash; you know, where there were actually holding the detainees or they were actively interrogating, other than people they would pick out from the general population. There was only like the hard site that everybody knows from, you know, the photographs.
I actually visited once at the behest of an interrogator who wanted to show me airplanes that they had constructed out of the cardboard from the MREs, or the “meals, ready-to-eat.” He was like a UAV scientist that they had deemed, you know, didn’t know anything they had wanted throughout interrogating him, so they were getting ready to move him into general population, but before that, she wanted to take photographs of these airplanes he had made. And so, I got to go down there, and, you know, that was the last time I wanted to go down there.
AMY GOODMAN : What did you see?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : It was just crazy. You know, it was the daytime, and there was an MP on duty, you know, just yelling and screaming at these detainees one minute and then the next minute going into conversation with me and this interrogator. And one minute he’s talking to me, and then &mdash; you know, and then he screamed at the detainee because this guy, I guess, he didn’t say his name during roll call loud enough, and so, for punishment, they’re making him say this number over and over and over again.
AMY GOODMAN : His number?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : The detainee.
AMY GOODMAN : The detainee’s number?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right. And they were telling &mdash; I guess his punishment was to say this number over and over and over again. And so, of course, his &mdash; you know, the volume of him saying this over and over would start to go lower, and then the MP would like yell at him for not doing that, you know, which isn’t a big deal, but it was just weird, the mentality of this MP, who’s, you know, talking to us, and he’s like, you know, “Oh, hey, how you doing?” &mdash; blah, blah, blah &mdash; and then, you know &mdash; and he’s like telling this guy to shut the hell up, you know, screaming at him, and then back to normal conversation and back to screaming and then back to normal conversation. And I was like, man, these guys are, you know &mdash; the responsibility these guys have is just &mdash;- I don’t know if I could do it.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you see -&mdash;
SAMUEL PROVANCE : And then it was just kind of crazy, because this &mdash; you know, we’re going into this holding cell just to take, you know, nice, cute pictures of the airplanes this guy made from his MRE , and he was like a really frail old man. And, I mean, you know, I’m sitting there wondering like, you know, what was this guy doing here to begin with?
AMY GOODMAN : Did you see naked prisoners?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : No, but I could have. I mean, it was just one of &mdash; like, again, I didn’t want to see, you know, so I didn’t look.
AMY GOODMAN : Former Army sergeant and Abu Ghraib whistleblower, Samuel Provance. We’ll come back to this exclusive interview in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN : We return to our interview with Abu Ghraib whistleblower Samuel Provance. I asked him to talk about reports that interrogators abused a sixteen-year-old Iraqi female prisoner.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : That was actually one of the first things I heard, was there were some guys that had gotten in trouble, and then I talked to their friends about it. And what had happened was, two interrogators had been drinking one night and then went to, you know, the hard sites to &mdash; you know, where they held all the detainees that they interrogate, and went into there under the guise of, you know, “We&#8217;re here to interrogate this girl.” And I guess she was sixteen years old. And, you know, they took her out, but instead of interrogating her, they had plans of molesting her or even raping her. And it may have even been the one girl they called jokingly “Fedateen,” because she was really flirtatious with soldiers and supposedly had love letters that soldiers had written her, and she was always &mdash; you know, they said that she was always trying to flirt with soldiers and whatnot.
And so, anyways, they said these guys had gotten caught because the MP on duty that night had noticed that something was amiss, and especially when he went by and saw that her shirt was taken off. So, you know, he made a phone call and got the situation under control.
But then came their prosecution, and I was even asked by one of their friends to lie and call Colonel Pappas’s character into question to somehow negate his authority, but, you know, I’m not going to do that. But nothing ended up happening to them. You know, I was told they were given some kind of suspension or some kind of Article 15, but it was basically brushed under the carpet and never heard from again. And then, even later, they denied that anything had even happened at all.
AMY GOODMAN : You also talked about them playing loud music. What music? What did they do?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : They said they would play all kinds of music, you know, Led Zeppelin, hard rock and whatnot. And then &mdash; but what I thought was disturbing was they said that their favorite was the Barney &quot;I Love You&quot; song from the children&#8217;s television show. But the way they described it, I mean, it was like everything was a game anymore to them dealing with these detainees, you know, that it’s like they weren’t even people to them anymore.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the use of dogs, Samuel Provance?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : The most pronounced time I heard about dogs was in the beginning of December, when they were talking about an incident where they were using the dogs to scare the detainees and how funny it was to see how they would run back into their cells. And, you know, it was just &mdash; it was maniacal, you know, kind of a laughter. And it was just &mdash; and then I’m like, you know, what’s next? You know?
AMY GOODMAN : Sam Provance, you were the only Military Intelligence soldier listed in the Taguba report as a witness.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : How could that be? Explain.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : I don’t know. I mean, when I cooperated with the investigators, CID , I assumed that I was going to be, you know, at the bottom of a long list. And yet, there I was, all by myself. The only other intelligence personnel was a civilian by the name of Torin Nelson. And he kind of went through somewhat of an ordeal as I have. But the only way I can describe it is that, you know, the soldiers, and most specifically people in intelligence, are trained to keep quiet, and they really feel that they&#8217;re a part of an inner circle, and no matter what goes on in that inner circle, good or bad, stays in that inner circle; anyone outside of it, you know, should never be privy to it. And even the psychological assessment done on the prison for the investigation even said that there appears to be a conspiracy of silence among the MI personnel.
AMY GOODMAN : Sam Provance, can you talk about the ghost prisoners, the ghost detainees?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : That was something I really didn’t know about, beyond being told that there were people that were there that they didn’t know were there anymore, but that was because of a lack of tracking and accountability. I don’t know about the specific ghost detainees, where they actually brought people in and specifically left them off the books. I didn’t know anything about that. But it’s things like that, that you &mdash; you know, you just didn’t know what was going on there.
You know, there were so many different moving pieces and very important and very powerful people monitoring what was going on. I mean, most people think that what happened at Abu Ghraib was just a handful of soldiers, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, some remote outpost, when in reality it was the premier hub of human intelligence, you know, being watched by the highest powers that be. I mean, even before I had gotten there, Donald Rumsfeld had visited there, Paul Wolfowitz, other representatives for other people in our government, as well as our own, you know, Army powers that be, such as General Ricardo Sanchez and General Fast. And there was brass all over the place on the prison itself. I mean, there was more first sergeants and commanders than you could shake a stick at.
You know, that’s why I know &mdash; and even what was going on, I mean, even the cooks knew thing that were going on. Even the mechanics knew the things that were going on. And that’s why, even to this day, I’m just completely amazed that there’s been nobody else that, you know, has had their conscience bother them to come forward and say, look, you know, this is what was really going on, and that, you know, it wasn’t just these MPs and that these MPs were really doing what they were told.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about &mdash; well, you have the Taguba investigation, and you were surprised that other folks like yourself did not come forward. You did not think you would be the only one. What about General Ricardo Sanchez talking about an investigation into what happened?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Yeah, we were actually still at the prison, because, by then, they had a Armed Forces Network feed into a television there, and we could watch the news. And, you know, we’re watching this news, and then General Sanchez is on there saying that there is now going to be an investigation into Abu Ghraib. But we kind of had a preview of that because of CID&#8217;s questioning &mdash; beginning to question people. And I was like &mdash; you know, because I had been telling them all along that they needed to be careful about what they were doing or not doing, because, you know, it was only a matter of time before we would begin getting investigated just like Guantanamo Bay was. You know, as early as then, Guantanamo Bay was in a full-swing investigation, and I knew it was only a matter of time before Abu Ghraib, which was kind of like, you know, Gitmo the sequel to us there. So it came as no surprise to me.
AMY GOODMAN : Was there any point within that time that you were there during the height of the abuses that people were starting to get tense, afraid they could be prosecuted?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Oh, yeah. They were very tense. And that’s what &mdash; you know, what really worried me also when I was called in, because they called everybody in for questioning, literally everybody, or everybody that they could, anyway. And they had everyone come and fill out a basic questionnaire that would just basically ask, you know: do you know of any abuse of detainees, yes or no? Do you know anything about photographs? And that was the first time I actually even knew there was photographs or even &mdash;- you know, just by implication of the question.
AMY GOODMAN : When was that?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : When I was questioned by CID .
AMY GOODMAN : And that was what month?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : That was January.
AMY GOODMAN : 2004.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right. And -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : It came out in the media in April &mdash; right? &mdash; in The New Yorker and CBS . So &mdash;-
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : But yours is January 2004 that you’re aware.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : Had you seen the pictures?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : No, no. Very few people, I would say, had seen the pictures, you know, because that’s the thing. I mean, everybody, you know, knew about all the things that were being done to these people, but very few people knew about the pictures. But it became the pictures that became the focus of the investigation and not what everybody else knew what was going on.
But I did ask -&mdash; I started asking questions now that I knew there was photographs involved, and I started asking questions. And a staff sergeant told me that she had heard something sexual involved with detainees, and it was then I was like, wow, it’s more &mdash; you know, it’s worse than I imagined, you know, because they&#8217;re actually taking pictures. And so, I thought, you know, the &mdash; I thought it was an interrogation, an interrogators’ thing, you know, because I thought the investigation was going to uncover what the interrogators were doing, military and civilian, and that they wouldn’t just set their sights on the MPs.
But like I said, going back to the questionnaire, the problem with the questionnaire is, if you just said no to all these questions, like, “Oh, no, I didn’t hear no &mdash; nothing, didn’t hear anything, see anything, didn’t do anything,” then the investigators wouldn’t question you further. It was like, “OK, no problem. Next?”
I was one of the few people, you know, that said, yeah, there’s a problem. And I even said that I was glad there was an investigation being done. And when they called me back, they made sure they let everybody know I was being called back. And immediately everybody assumed, you know, either that I was in trouble myself or that I was telling on people that were in trouble. And even then, I’m thinking, you know, I might not leave here alive.
AMY GOODMAN : Were you ever directly threatened?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : No.
AMY GOODMAN : Did you ever think of making a written complaint?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Yes, but I knew, you know, I didn’t have anything concrete. You know, I didn’t have anything to really &mdash; because, you know, any &mdash; the way the military handles a lot of investigations, however big or small, is to play a little mind game with perception, where they tell the soldier that in their mind that’s what happened, but that’s just their perception of events, and so it’s not real, it’s only real in their mind.
AMY GOODMAN : You wrote for Alternet , “As an Army intelligence analyst, my job at Abu Ghraib was systems administrator (&quot;the computer guy&quot;). But I had the bad luck to be on the night shift. And so I saw the detainees dragged in for interrogation, heard the screams, and saw many of them dragged out. When I heard that the officer in charge of the interrogation/torture operation at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was being court-martialed, my first thought was: ‘Finally an officer is being held accountable.’&quot; Did you see detainees being dragged? Did you hear them screaming?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Yeah. Yeah, at night. You know, you never knew when or where you would see a lot of things. You know, the interrogators told the investigation they only interrogated in, you know, one of a few places, when in reality they interrogated them all over the place. And you would see them taking them in all sorts of directions, you know, cuffed with their heads bagged, and you’re just, you know, wondering: OK, you know, I wonder what that guy did, or I wonder what they’re going to do to that guy. And it just &mdash; it was just really depressing.
AMY GOODMAN : You say, “Watching Act I of the faux-trial of Lt. Col. Steven Jordan last week at Fort Meade, Md., confirmed my worst suspicions. I know Jordan; I was in place for his entire tenure at Abu Ghraib, including when prisoners were being tortured. He was an immediate boss.” What happened to him?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : He was &mdash; I think what happened with him &mdash; this is just my opinion &mdash; is what happened with Colonel Pappas. And that is, essentially, you know, some sort of an agreement was made behind closed doors, where as long as he kept his mouth shut, didn’t give any interviews, don’t write any books, don’t talk to anybody about what really happened, as long as he plays the game that’s being set up for them, that they’re going to get off scot-free. That’s exactly what happened to Pappas.
And Pappas and Jordan are two major bridges for everything that happened at that prison. I mean, originally I was thinking they were going to hang Jordan out to dry because of all the negative comments made by Pappas and Taguba and everybody else and just how shady his testimony was in those interviews for those investigations. And I was thinking that Jordan was going to get crucified and that, as a result, he was going to tell everything that he knew and bring the whole house down. But instead, things were set up in such a way for him to &mdash; you know, as long as he didn’t pursue something like that and just kept his mouth shut, you know, everything was going to be taken care of and no real charges were going to be made. And that’s exactly what happened. I mean, even before the trial started, most of the charges were dropped. And then, the one charge that he was found guilty for really had nothing to do with the prison. It was just him disobeying General Fay.
AMY GOODMAN : And the conviction was dismissed against Jordan. This is Democracy Now! We&#8217;re talking to former Army sergeant and Abu Ghraib whistleblower, Samuel Provance. We’ll be back with him in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN : We return to our interview with Abu Ghraib whistleblower Samuel Provance. I asked him to talk about what happened after the Abu Ghraib torture photos appeared in The New Yorker magazine and on 60 Minutes in April of 2004.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right after? Well, the photographs came out not long after we came back to Germany, and it was just, you know, wow! I mean, I knew there was going to be an investigation, but I didn’t know there was going to be, you know, this global scandal. And it was just surreal to see the pictures on the news, you know, 24/7 during that time, knowing that’s exactly where I came from. And I already knew there was the Taguba investigation, which, you know, was subsequently mysteriously leaked to the public, which actually revealed my name, which I never thought was going to be revealed.
And then there was General Fay. You know, suddenly I’m being told, you know, “You’re going to go talk to this general up in Darmschtadt.” And, you know &mdash; and this major was like, you know, “I can’t tell you not to talk to the media, but I wouldn’t talk to them, because this thing is probably going to be as big as My Lai. And, you know, so you need to go talk to this general up in Darmschtadt.” And it actually wasn’t until I was being interviewed by him that I even knew who he was or what he was there for and that there was another investigation.
And, you know, it originally began as something &mdash; you know, he was trying to get me to relax, you know, like, “Yeah, I’m a general, but it’s no big deal,” and, you know, a really friendly guy. And then, you know, he just had simple questions, but everything focused on just the MPs or the photographs and only made mention of &mdash; and it seemed like he was actually trying to get Colonel Jordan on something. But every time I would try to talk to him about the things I was told by the interrogators and things, he didn’t want to &mdash; he didn’t want to hear it. You know, he only wanted to know basically the undeniable. And it wasn’t until after pressuring him, you know, that I wanted to get more on record for his investigation that he finally said, “OK, you know, if you want to tell me, tell me.” And so, I told him as much as I could remember.
And then, you know, everything changed, and then suddenly I was a bad guy. And then he even pulled my statement from the original investigation and was like, you know, “Oh, yeah, it says you, you know &mdash; you’re glad there was an investigation being done,” and then he’s like calling that into question, using it against me and saying if I really cared, you know, I would have tried to do something long before that investigation, and then told me that I could have basically &mdash; not that I could have prevented the abuse and the torture, but that I could have prevented the scandal.
AMY GOODMAN : Whole thing, you?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : And what did you say?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : I told him I didn’t understand. You know, I told him I was in shock. I was like, you know, “I’m being honest with you. I’m &mdash; you know, I’m cooperating. I don’t understand how I go from being a witness to &mdash; you know, from one investigation to being a criminal in the next.” And &mdash; because, by then, he had said he was going to recommend me for administrative action, of being derelict of duty.
And then, later, when his investigation was released, he even heaped two more charges on me. One, which was interfering with the investigation, which &mdash; referencing my speaking to the media, like I am with you right now, and then &mdash; I can’t remember the other charge, but ended up dropping them &mdash; or disobeying a direct order, which was disobeying the gag order, which I had learned I was the only one to receive from my unit &mdash; or anybody from Abu Ghraib. And then it took a long time, though, for them to even go into that, and they, of course, dropped those charges, except for disobeying a direct order, because obviously, you know, that can be proven on a technical basis, because I had spoken to the media after being told not to.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about the mistreatment of General Zabar and his son?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Originally, the general was supposed to be interrogated, and this was the one interrogation I was actually a part of, and the only reason I agreed to be a part of it was because the interrogator, who really wasn’t an interrogator, was a former soldier of mine who was an analyst, and I knew I could trust him not to be an animal or to try to talk me into doing something I know I wouldn’t want to do. And so he came to Abu Ghraib from Camp Victory as a subject matter expert on the general, because he had been spending weeks and months studying this man in particular.
And when he finally arrived and we were supposed to go interrogate him, they said we couldn’t interrogate him because the general had already been broken from several hours of interrogation. But as a consolation, they said, “We have his son, and you can interrogate him.” You know, and I’m thinking, you know, wow, this is kind of crazy. You know, why do we have his son? But then I’m thinking, you know, just because he’s younger doesn’t mean he can’t be a part of some kind of criminal activity, you know, himself. So we went out to the general population, which is where he was located, and, you know, saw just how young he was. And, you know, he was very, very frail, very scared, and it was obvious he was coming from a rich family. And, you know, he was just petrified.
And, you know, we brought him in to interrogate him, which was really more of an interview, because, like I said, my friend is &mdash; he’s a pretty mild-mannered person. And it was just matter-of-fact questions that &mdash; and it became quite apparent that he didn’t know anything and that he was just guilty of being this general&#8217;s son. And then, he even told me about his brother also being there, wanting to know where he was.
And it was really kind of heartbreaking when he said that he was glad that we were there, but that he didn’t understand what we were doing now that we were there, you know? And he cited things that were happening to him, as well as, you know, how his family was &mdash; all their property was being seized by the Kurds because we were turning a blind eye to what the Kurds were doing. You know, and I was just like, wow! And then we took him back, and I come to find out, you know, what they had done to break his father, which was, you know, abusing him.
AMY GOODMAN : How had they abused him?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : They had covered him in mud, or they had doused him in cold water and drove him around in a truck, which at that time was freezing cold at night, and covered him in mud and then, I guess, gave his father the impression that, “OK, we’re going to take a break from the interrogation, and you can see your son, who’s also here.” And then, you know, he’s thinking he’s going to see his son and have some kind of a reunion with him, but instead they just allowed him to see his son in this shivering, muddy state. And, you know, who knows what else they might have told him they had done to him or they were going to do to him unless he started talking? And then, supposedly, that’s what broke him down, and he told them whatever it is they wanted to know, but kind of find out later through &mdash; I guess they had done some investigation &mdash; but this guy was just some air defense general and he didn’t know anything himself. So the entire thing was just one big useless fiasco.
But you have this boy getting abused and his father getting abused, and it was all for nothing. And that really typifies the whole operation, because, as you know, what was found out later, you know, nothing really productive ever came out of Abu Ghraib. And I could have told you that when I was there, because I would talk to several of the soldiers, the MI soldiers that were there, and they were continuously coming up with, you know, poppycock reports from all sorts of information that they were getting from these detainees. And Colonel Pappas had instituted a quota system, so then they were even forced into this role of conjuring up reports and just sending them out there. But they don’t realize or take into account that they actually get used in the field and that it created this whole cycle of bad intel, picking up the wrong people, which created even more bad intel and which ended up creating more people getting detained. And they weren’t letting anybody go.
And then the prison became its own problem, because then, you know, we started getting more mortar attacks, more RPG attacks or sniper attacks or IEDs. And then the intelligence efforts became finding out who was attacking the prison more than what was actually going on in the insurgency or where was Saddam Hussein.
AMY GOODMAN : Sam Provance, you obviously know a lot about what happened at Abu Ghraib, yet on May 14, 2004, you were ordered not to talk about it. Tell us what happened.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : It hadn’t been long after I had talked to General Fay, and of course the media had already tried to contact me, but I didn’t want to &mdash; you know, I didn’t know what was going on and I was trusting that the investigation would uncover, you know, what had happened, you know, that people under this unbearable burden of, you know, the scandal and the assumed scrutiny would begin &mdash; you know, somebody else, others, many others, would begin talking or confessing.
So, you know, one day I’m called in off-duty. I’m off duty, and I get called in from my company commander, and it’s like super emergency. And I come down to the company, and then it’s him and my first sergeant in his office. And then, he’s like &mdash; you know, he’s got this order in his hand written on a counseling form, and he’s like, “Don’t talk to me. Don’t ask me any questions. I just want you to read this and sign it,” which is highly irregular, because anytime you&#8217;re given any kind of a counseling form or an order, it’s read to you, and then, you know, you basically check in a block that you agree that what they have &mdash; you know, that what’s on that paper is what they’ve explained to you in person and that &mdash; not that you agree to it necessarily, but that you agree that that’s &mdash; you know, that you understand what is being told to you. And I could see he was under a lot of stress. I mean, he was very &mdash; because I even tried to ask him. I’m like, “Well, what if my mother needs to know that I’m not, you know, part of the abuse, you know, that I’m actually a part of trying to stop it?” And then he’s like, “I told you, don’t talk to me. Don’t ask me any questions. Just read this and sign it.” And so, you know, of course, I signed it.
And it was then that I knew, because that was after talking to General Fay &mdash; and it was then, at that moment, that I knew, you know, this was getting covered up. And then, once I found out that I was the only person that received such an order from the many other people in my unit that were there, that’s when I really knew this was &mdash; you know, the cover-up was in full swing. And from that moment on, I started thinking, OK, you know, if I don’t say anything, then nobody is going to say anything. So I had to say something. And then I actually hoped that when I spoke out that other people would start speaking out, too, but that didn’t happen. They just watched as, you know, I got into all that trouble, and then they saw what would happen to them if they spoke, too. And so, a lot of them to this day remain quiet.
AMY GOODMAN : Well, four days after you were ordered not to discuss Abu Ghraib, ABC News aired an interview with you. Three days later, your were administratively flagged, your top-secret clearance pulled. Talk about this period right through to July 2005, your rank being reduced.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, what they did is they suspended my clearance, which effectively kicked me out of the building I worked in. And I was then put into the headquarters platoon, which is where all the mischievous intelligence soldiers go because, you know, they’ve lost their clearance for having gotten into some kind of trouble.
AMY GOODMAN : Where was that?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : It was in the headquarters platoon within the company.
AMY GOODMAN : Where?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : That’s in Alpha Company 302nd.
AMY GOODMAN : Geographically, where?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : That’s in Heidelberg, Germany. And so that they knew that I would get kicked out, because they didn’t want me working with the others. And they knew, by taking my clearance, that that would kick me out of the building, and then I couldn’t be &mdash; I could no longer be in that inner circle I told you about. So now I was on the outer circle with all the mechanics and the admin, the soldiers, the people in the offices, and that’s where I bounced around at. You know, one minute I was doing one thing, and another minute I’m doing the other. And they just kept in this limbo state for the longest time, and I didn’t know what was going to happen at any time.
And it wasn’t until sixteen months later that they suddenly said, “Hey, you have to drive up to Grafenveer to be read your Article 15.” And then, at the Article 15, I was told that if I didn’t accept the Article 15, which was going to be a demotion and possible loss of pay that I would have to, you know, demand a court-martial, and at that court-martial, I would be subject to prison up to ten years. And after talking to my lawyer, Scott Horton, you know, it was a lose-lose case because the military prosecution wins 90 percent of its cases, which is hardly a fair trial and which also goes to show, like at Colonel Jordan&#8217;s trial, how fixed that trial was, because military prosecution wins any case, essentially, that it wants to.
AMY GOODMAN : Ten years in prison for what?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : For disobeying a direct order, which was speaking to the media.
AMY GOODMAN : That’s more than anyone got at Abu Ghraib, except, what, Charles Graner.
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, originally I was going to fight it and demand a court-martial, but like I said, my lawyer said this is their playing field, and, you know, they’ll do it. And, you know, all these people, they’re telling me that they support you, will be writing you Christmas cards when you’re in prison.
AMY GOODMAN : So where do you stand right now? You are a specialist?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Right. I was a specialist, and they never gave me a chance to get my rank back. And then they basically put me back into the same limbo state I had been in. And even though I was &mdash; even though my clearance was given back to me, I wasn’t given local clearance to work my job as an intelligence analyst anymore. So they kept me in this limbo state until the day I got out of the Army, which was October of last year. And since then, I’m basically still trying to get a job.
AMY GOODMAN : Are you having trouble?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Yeah, actually, I am. I mean, I know some things take time, but, you know &mdash; and I actually tried to work as a prison guard at a county jail, but that didn’t fare too well at all.
AMY GOODMAN : Why not?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : To be honest, I didn’t want to be a part of another scandal.
AMY GOODMAN : Samuel Provance, so reflect now on what has happened to you. You had top security clearance, you were a staff sergeant, now you’re a guard at a mall and having trouble finding a job that you would like to keep. Was the whistleblowing worth it? Do you think that anything has been learned by the military? Do you think high-level officials should be prosecuted?
SAMUEL PROVANCE : Well, on a personal level, obviously, I would say it’s not worth it, you know, but this is bigger than me. You know, this is about the integrity of right and wrong and, you know, how we’re portrayed to the world we’re supposedly trying to help. Has anything I’ve done or said made an effect? I don’t know. I mean, these things are so big and complex you really don’t know what difference you really make. You know, you just have to do it and hope for the best.
AMY GOODMAN : Former Army sergeant, Abu Ghraib whistleblower, Sam Provance, first intelligence specialist to speak openly about abuse at the prison, the only Military Intelligence soldier listed as a witness in the Teguba report. When Provance defied an order to speak to the media about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the Army stripped him of his security clearance, demoted him in rank and threatened him with ten years in jail.AMYGOODMAN: Four years ago this week, the Army launched its first investigation into allegations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. This investigation by Army Major General Antonio Taguba, along with photos leaked by the media, eventually helped expose the widespread abuse and torture taking place inside the US-run jail.

In the four years since Taguba began his investigation, not one officer or civilian leader has been held criminally responsible for the abuses. Last month, the US Army threw out the conviction of the only officer court-martialed in the torture scandal. Meanwhile, several soldiers who helped expose the torture have been punished.

Today, we spend the hour with Abu Ghraib whistleblower and former Army sergeant, Samuel Provance. From September 2003 to the spring of 2004, Provance ran the top-secret computer network used by Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib. He was the first intelligence specialist to speak openly about abuse at the prison and is the only Military Intelligence soldier listed as a witness in the Taguba report.

When Provance defied an order not to speak to the media about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the Army stripped him of his security clearance, demoted him in rank and threatened him with ten years in jail. Eventually, Samuel Provance was forced to leave the armed forces. When we spoke to him late last year, Samuel Provance was struggling to find a job and was working as a private security guard at a mall.

I began by asking him how he learned of the abuses taking place inside Abu Ghraib.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, I was really intrigued by the interrogators, and I was just curious as to exactly what was it like in the day — you know, a day in the life of an interrogator. So I would just ask them, you know, questions, because, you know, my job allowed me to kind of float among the premises, because I was just, for the most part, helping people whenever they had problems after the network had been set up and maintained. So I would just ask questions here and there, you know, from different people, like, you know, exactly what goes on in interrogation or what kind of people do you interrogate, what are some of the things that go on, you know, things of that nature or just being somewhere listening to somebody talking about an interrogation.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the information you started to gather, the people you started to meet.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, first of all, there was the interrogators. And originally it was just a handful of people. You know, it was the 519th and the 325th, which were half-active and half-reservist. And then, there was a big difference between Camp Victory, because at Camp Victory everybody was kind of dog-eat-dog, whereas at Abu Ghraib, people were more like family, and, you know, it was very — the people were very bonded. But it was completely different.

And, you know, I would ask questions about interrogations and stuff, and the things they started telling me were alarming, you know, beginning with the nudity. You know, one girl was an interrogator just out of the schoolhouse, a reservist, nineteen years old, and she was telling me about, you know, interrogating somebody in the nude. And, you know, I’m thinking, even me, as a man, would have some reservation about doing something like that, or, you know, if I could do that. But here she is, a nineteen-year-old girl, you know, interrogating a naked prisoner. But she talked about it without batting an eye, you know, like it wasn’t an issue for her.

AMYGOODMAN: Did you challenge her about it?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, yeah, I would — there were several times I would try to talk to them about what was going on there ethically, but, you know, they would always brush me off, you know, because I was the computer guy or an analyst. You know, “What do you really know?” And, you know, for me, it was like I don’t know the legality of everything, but just because I’m against it doesn’t mean it’s illegal.

AMYGOODMAN: Sam Provance, can you talk about the difference between the people who were originally there, the MI soldiers, Military Intelligence, and then those who were brought in from Guantanamo, and how things changed?

SAMUELPROVANCE: There was an incredible difference. The people from Guantanamo Bay came in as the experts, as the fixers, you know, that Abu Ghraib was a problem, that they weren’t getting enough product from, and the people from Gitmo were there to fix this problem and to show them how it’s really done.

AMYGOODMAN: Who were these Gitmo soldiers?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Specifically, I really don’t know. I just know they were from Gitmo. They let you know they were from Gitmo. And, you know, they were very arrogant. And they didn’t — you know, there was a big fight between the old school and the new school, and, you know, the new school won.

AMYGOODMAN: You were trained at Fort Huachuca?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Where is that?

SAMUELPROVANCE: That’s in Arizona.

AMYGOODMAN: And what were you trained to do? What did you understand was proper, and what wasn’t?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, I was trained to be an intelligence analyst. And, you know, you’re kind of — you get acquainted with the different sources of intelligence or how they gather, you know, different types of intelligence, whether it’s, you know, electronic or human, you know, whatever the case may be. And then there’s a small section where they actually go into human intelligence. And basically, you know, it’s just about — you know, what I got — what I was acquainted with was, you know, what’s considered like the rapport system, which is, you know, getting a person to tell their story so that they’re not actually resisting, they’re cooperating.

AMYGOODMAN: You say the Guantanamo people had very different ideas.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Absolutely.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, you had Guantanamo soldiers, but you also had an increase in the number of civilian contractors. Who were they? Where were they from? What companies?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, they would tell you where they were from or who they worked for, but you really didn’t know if they were telling the truth. You know, the whole place was very mysterious, and you didn’t — you know, somebody could tell you they were from CACI or they were from Titan, but you didn’t know if they were from actually the other or if they might have actually been CIA or FBI or any other. And then there was also the prospect of spies.

AMYGOODMAN: Spies?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, of course. I mean, anytime you’re dealing with intelligence, there’s always the possibility of there being a spy.

AMYGOODMAN: Spy for...?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Who knows?

AMYGOODMAN: So these guys from CACI or Titan, or how they identified themselves, were interrogators, translators, linguists?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right. Some of them were actually foreign. And the one thing I noticed about the majority of the foreign linguists and interpreters were that they hated the Iraqi people.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you elaborate?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, anytime you just had a conversation with them, they just had no remorse or no sympathy for what was going on in Iraq. And anytime I would bring up, you know, the question of what was being done to the prisoners, whether it was their being wrongfully detained because they’re completely innocent and/or being abused, tortured, maybe even killed, and they just — you know, it was something they didn’t care and were glad about, if anything.

AMYGOODMAN: So, your job was, as you’ve described it, making accounts for new users, troubleshooting computer problems, backing up the secret shared drive, maintaining secret and top-secret network connectivity, manning the top-secret part of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center, JIDC. What were you learning? Tell us more about the conversations that you were having, where you were allowed to go in the prison, where you were not allowed to go.

SAMUELPROVANCE: There really wasn’t anywhere I couldn’t go, but there was a lot of places you just didn’t want to go, because you didn’t want to know what was going on. You know, in the intelligence world, you know, you’re really held accountable for the things that you learn, so there’s a lot of things you really don’t want to know, even if you could know them. One of those was the — you know, where there were actually holding the detainees or they were actively interrogating, other than people they would pick out from the general population. There was only like the hard site that everybody knows from, you know, the photographs.

I actually visited once at the behest of an interrogator who wanted to show me airplanes that they had constructed out of the cardboard from the MREs, or the “meals, ready-to-eat.” He was like a UAV scientist that they had deemed, you know, didn’t know anything they had wanted throughout interrogating him, so they were getting ready to move him into general population, but before that, she wanted to take photographs of these airplanes he had made. And so, I got to go down there, and, you know, that was the last time I wanted to go down there.

AMYGOODMAN: What did you see?

SAMUELPROVANCE: It was just crazy. You know, it was the daytime, and there was an MP on duty, you know, just yelling and screaming at these detainees one minute and then the next minute going into conversation with me and this interrogator. And one minute he’s talking to me, and then — you know, and then he screamed at the detainee because this guy, I guess, he didn’t say his name during roll call loud enough, and so, for punishment, they’re making him say this number over and over and over again.

AMYGOODMAN: His number?

SAMUELPROVANCE: The detainee.

AMYGOODMAN: The detainee’s number?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right. And they were telling — I guess his punishment was to say this number over and over and over again. And so, of course, his — you know, the volume of him saying this over and over would start to go lower, and then the MP would like yell at him for not doing that, you know, which isn’t a big deal, but it was just weird, the mentality of this MP, who’s, you know, talking to us, and he’s like, you know, “Oh, hey, how you doing?” — blah, blah, blah — and then, you know — and he’s like telling this guy to shut the hell up, you know, screaming at him, and then back to normal conversation and back to screaming and then back to normal conversation. And I was like, man, these guys are, you know — the responsibility these guys have is just —- I don’t know if I could do it.

AMYGOODMAN: Did you see -—

SAMUELPROVANCE: And then it was just kind of crazy, because this — you know, we’re going into this holding cell just to take, you know, nice, cute pictures of the airplanes this guy made from his MRE, and he was like a really frail old man. And, I mean, you know, I’m sitting there wondering like, you know, what was this guy doing here to begin with?

AMYGOODMAN: Did you see naked prisoners?

SAMUELPROVANCE: No, but I could have. I mean, it was just one of — like, again, I didn’t want to see, you know, so I didn’t look.

AMYGOODMAN: Former Army sergeant and Abu Ghraib whistleblower, Samuel Provance. We’ll come back to this exclusive interview in a minute.

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AMYGOODMAN: We return to our interview with Abu Ghraib whistleblower Samuel Provance. I asked him to talk about reports that interrogators abused a sixteen-year-old Iraqi female prisoner.

SAMUELPROVANCE: That was actually one of the first things I heard, was there were some guys that had gotten in trouble, and then I talked to their friends about it. And what had happened was, two interrogators had been drinking one night and then went to, you know, the hard sites to — you know, where they held all the detainees that they interrogate, and went into there under the guise of, you know, “We’re here to interrogate this girl.” And I guess she was sixteen years old. And, you know, they took her out, but instead of interrogating her, they had plans of molesting her or even raping her. And it may have even been the one girl they called jokingly “Fedateen,” because she was really flirtatious with soldiers and supposedly had love letters that soldiers had written her, and she was always — you know, they said that she was always trying to flirt with soldiers and whatnot.

And so, anyways, they said these guys had gotten caught because the MP on duty that night had noticed that something was amiss, and especially when he went by and saw that her shirt was taken off. So, you know, he made a phone call and got the situation under control.

But then came their prosecution, and I was even asked by one of their friends to lie and call Colonel Pappas’s character into question to somehow negate his authority, but, you know, I’m not going to do that. But nothing ended up happening to them. You know, I was told they were given some kind of suspension or some kind of Article 15, but it was basically brushed under the carpet and never heard from again. And then, even later, they denied that anything had even happened at all.

AMYGOODMAN: You also talked about them playing loud music. What music? What did they do?

SAMUELPROVANCE: They said they would play all kinds of music, you know, Led Zeppelin, hard rock and whatnot. And then — but what I thought was disturbing was they said that their favorite was the Barney "I Love You" song from the children’s television show. But the way they described it, I mean, it was like everything was a game anymore to them dealing with these detainees, you know, that it’s like they weren’t even people to them anymore.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the use of dogs, Samuel Provance?

SAMUELPROVANCE: The most pronounced time I heard about dogs was in the beginning of December, when they were talking about an incident where they were using the dogs to scare the detainees and how funny it was to see how they would run back into their cells. And, you know, it was just — it was maniacal, you know, kind of a laughter. And it was just — and then I’m like, you know, what’s next? You know?

AMYGOODMAN: Sam Provance, you were the only Military Intelligence soldier listed in the Taguba report as a witness.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: How could that be? Explain.

SAMUELPROVANCE: I don’t know. I mean, when I cooperated with the investigators, CID, I assumed that I was going to be, you know, at the bottom of a long list. And yet, there I was, all by myself. The only other intelligence personnel was a civilian by the name of Torin Nelson. And he kind of went through somewhat of an ordeal as I have. But the only way I can describe it is that, you know, the soldiers, and most specifically people in intelligence, are trained to keep quiet, and they really feel that they’re a part of an inner circle, and no matter what goes on in that inner circle, good or bad, stays in that inner circle; anyone outside of it, you know, should never be privy to it. And even the psychological assessment done on the prison for the investigation even said that there appears to be a conspiracy of silence among the MI personnel.

AMYGOODMAN: Sam Provance, can you talk about the ghost prisoners, the ghost detainees?

SAMUELPROVANCE: That was something I really didn’t know about, beyond being told that there were people that were there that they didn’t know were there anymore, but that was because of a lack of tracking and accountability. I don’t know about the specific ghost detainees, where they actually brought people in and specifically left them off the books. I didn’t know anything about that. But it’s things like that, that you — you know, you just didn’t know what was going on there.

You know, there were so many different moving pieces and very important and very powerful people monitoring what was going on. I mean, most people think that what happened at Abu Ghraib was just a handful of soldiers, you know, out in the middle of nowhere, some remote outpost, when in reality it was the premier hub of human intelligence, you know, being watched by the highest powers that be. I mean, even before I had gotten there, Donald Rumsfeld had visited there, Paul Wolfowitz, other representatives for other people in our government, as well as our own, you know, Army powers that be, such as General Ricardo Sanchez and General Fast. And there was brass all over the place on the prison itself. I mean, there was more first sergeants and commanders than you could shake a stick at.

You know, that’s why I know — and even what was going on, I mean, even the cooks knew thing that were going on. Even the mechanics knew the things that were going on. And that’s why, even to this day, I’m just completely amazed that there’s been nobody else that, you know, has had their conscience bother them to come forward and say, look, you know, this is what was really going on, and that, you know, it wasn’t just these MPs and that these MPs were really doing what they were told.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about — well, you have the Taguba investigation, and you were surprised that other folks like yourself did not come forward. You did not think you would be the only one. What about General Ricardo Sanchez talking about an investigation into what happened?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Yeah, we were actually still at the prison, because, by then, they had a Armed Forces Network feed into a television there, and we could watch the news. And, you know, we’re watching this news, and then General Sanchez is on there saying that there is now going to be an investigation into Abu Ghraib. But we kind of had a preview of that because of CID’s questioning — beginning to question people. And I was like — you know, because I had been telling them all along that they needed to be careful about what they were doing or not doing, because, you know, it was only a matter of time before we would begin getting investigated just like Guantanamo Bay was. You know, as early as then, Guantanamo Bay was in a full-swing investigation, and I knew it was only a matter of time before Abu Ghraib, which was kind of like, you know, Gitmo the sequel to us there. So it came as no surprise to me.

AMYGOODMAN: Was there any point within that time that you were there during the height of the abuses that people were starting to get tense, afraid they could be prosecuted?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Oh, yeah. They were very tense. And that’s what — you know, what really worried me also when I was called in, because they called everybody in for questioning, literally everybody, or everybody that they could, anyway. And they had everyone come and fill out a basic questionnaire that would just basically ask, you know: do you know of any abuse of detainees, yes or no? Do you know anything about photographs? And that was the first time I actually even knew there was photographs or even —- you know, just by implication of the question.

AMYGOODMAN: When was that?

SAMUELPROVANCE: When I was questioned by CID.

AMYGOODMAN: And that was what month?

SAMUELPROVANCE: That was January.

AMYGOODMAN: 2004.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right. And -—

AMYGOODMAN: It came out in the media in April — right? — in The New Yorker and CBS. So —-

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: But yours is January 2004 that you’re aware.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: Had you seen the pictures?

SAMUELPROVANCE: No, no. Very few people, I would say, had seen the pictures, you know, because that’s the thing. I mean, everybody, you know, knew about all the things that were being done to these people, but very few people knew about the pictures. But it became the pictures that became the focus of the investigation and not what everybody else knew what was going on.

But I did ask -— I started asking questions now that I knew there was photographs involved, and I started asking questions. And a staff sergeant told me that she had heard something sexual involved with detainees, and it was then I was like, wow, it’s more — you know, it’s worse than I imagined, you know, because they’re actually taking pictures. And so, I thought, you know, the — I thought it was an interrogation, an interrogators’ thing, you know, because I thought the investigation was going to uncover what the interrogators were doing, military and civilian, and that they wouldn’t just set their sights on the MPs.

But like I said, going back to the questionnaire, the problem with the questionnaire is, if you just said no to all these questions, like, “Oh, no, I didn’t hear no — nothing, didn’t hear anything, see anything, didn’t do anything,” then the investigators wouldn’t question you further. It was like, “OK, no problem. Next?”

I was one of the few people, you know, that said, yeah, there’s a problem. And I even said that I was glad there was an investigation being done. And when they called me back, they made sure they let everybody know I was being called back. And immediately everybody assumed, you know, either that I was in trouble myself or that I was telling on people that were in trouble. And even then, I’m thinking, you know, I might not leave here alive.

AMYGOODMAN: Were you ever directly threatened?

SAMUELPROVANCE: No.

AMYGOODMAN: Did you ever think of making a written complaint?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Yes, but I knew, you know, I didn’t have anything concrete. You know, I didn’t have anything to really — because, you know, any — the way the military handles a lot of investigations, however big or small, is to play a little mind game with perception, where they tell the soldier that in their mind that’s what happened, but that’s just their perception of events, and so it’s not real, it’s only real in their mind.

AMYGOODMAN: You wrote for Alternet, “As an Army intelligence analyst, my job at Abu Ghraib was systems administrator ("the computer guy"). But I had the bad luck to be on the night shift. And so I saw the detainees dragged in for interrogation, heard the screams, and saw many of them dragged out. When I heard that the officer in charge of the interrogation/torture operation at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was being court-martialed, my first thought was: ‘Finally an officer is being held accountable.’" Did you see detainees being dragged? Did you hear them screaming?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Yeah. Yeah, at night. You know, you never knew when or where you would see a lot of things. You know, the interrogators told the investigation they only interrogated in, you know, one of a few places, when in reality they interrogated them all over the place. And you would see them taking them in all sorts of directions, you know, cuffed with their heads bagged, and you’re just, you know, wondering: OK, you know, I wonder what that guy did, or I wonder what they’re going to do to that guy. And it just — it was just really depressing.

AMYGOODMAN: You say, “Watching Act I of the faux-trial of Lt. Col. Steven Jordan last week at Fort Meade, Md., confirmed my worst suspicions. I know Jordan; I was in place for his entire tenure at Abu Ghraib, including when prisoners were being tortured. He was an immediate boss.” What happened to him?

SAMUELPROVANCE: He was — I think what happened with him — this is just my opinion — is what happened with Colonel Pappas. And that is, essentially, you know, some sort of an agreement was made behind closed doors, where as long as he kept his mouth shut, didn’t give any interviews, don’t write any books, don’t talk to anybody about what really happened, as long as he plays the game that’s being set up for them, that they’re going to get off scot-free. That’s exactly what happened to Pappas.

And Pappas and Jordan are two major bridges for everything that happened at that prison. I mean, originally I was thinking they were going to hang Jordan out to dry because of all the negative comments made by Pappas and Taguba and everybody else and just how shady his testimony was in those interviews for those investigations. And I was thinking that Jordan was going to get crucified and that, as a result, he was going to tell everything that he knew and bring the whole house down. But instead, things were set up in such a way for him to — you know, as long as he didn’t pursue something like that and just kept his mouth shut, you know, everything was going to be taken care of and no real charges were going to be made. And that’s exactly what happened. I mean, even before the trial started, most of the charges were dropped. And then, the one charge that he was found guilty for really had nothing to do with the prison. It was just him disobeying General Fay.

AMYGOODMAN: And the conviction was dismissed against Jordan. This is Democracy Now! We’re talking to former Army sergeant and Abu Ghraib whistleblower, Samuel Provance. We’ll be back with him in a minute.

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AMYGOODMAN: We return to our interview with Abu Ghraib whistleblower Samuel Provance. I asked him to talk about what happened after the Abu Ghraib torture photos appeared in The New Yorker magazine and on 60 Minutes in April of 2004.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right after? Well, the photographs came out not long after we came back to Germany, and it was just, you know, wow! I mean, I knew there was going to be an investigation, but I didn’t know there was going to be, you know, this global scandal. And it was just surreal to see the pictures on the news, you know, 24/7 during that time, knowing that’s exactly where I came from. And I already knew there was the Taguba investigation, which, you know, was subsequently mysteriously leaked to the public, which actually revealed my name, which I never thought was going to be revealed.

And then there was General Fay. You know, suddenly I’m being told, you know, “You’re going to go talk to this general up in Darmschtadt.” And, you know — and this major was like, you know, “I can’t tell you not to talk to the media, but I wouldn’t talk to them, because this thing is probably going to be as big as My Lai. And, you know, so you need to go talk to this general up in Darmschtadt.” And it actually wasn’t until I was being interviewed by him that I even knew who he was or what he was there for and that there was another investigation.

And, you know, it originally began as something — you know, he was trying to get me to relax, you know, like, “Yeah, I’m a general, but it’s no big deal,” and, you know, a really friendly guy. And then, you know, he just had simple questions, but everything focused on just the MPs or the photographs and only made mention of — and it seemed like he was actually trying to get Colonel Jordan on something. But every time I would try to talk to him about the things I was told by the interrogators and things, he didn’t want to — he didn’t want to hear it. You know, he only wanted to know basically the undeniable. And it wasn’t until after pressuring him, you know, that I wanted to get more on record for his investigation that he finally said, “OK, you know, if you want to tell me, tell me.” And so, I told him as much as I could remember.

And then, you know, everything changed, and then suddenly I was a bad guy. And then he even pulled my statement from the original investigation and was like, you know, “Oh, yeah, it says you, you know — you’re glad there was an investigation being done,” and then he’s like calling that into question, using it against me and saying if I really cared, you know, I would have tried to do something long before that investigation, and then told me that I could have basically — not that I could have prevented the abuse and the torture, but that I could have prevented the scandal.

AMYGOODMAN: Whole thing, you?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: And what did you say?

SAMUELPROVANCE: I told him I didn’t understand. You know, I told him I was in shock. I was like, you know, “I’m being honest with you. I’m — you know, I’m cooperating. I don’t understand how I go from being a witness to — you know, from one investigation to being a criminal in the next.” And — because, by then, he had said he was going to recommend me for administrative action, of being derelict of duty.

And then, later, when his investigation was released, he even heaped two more charges on me. One, which was interfering with the investigation, which — referencing my speaking to the media, like I am with you right now, and then — I can’t remember the other charge, but ended up dropping them — or disobeying a direct order, which was disobeying the gag order, which I had learned I was the only one to receive from my unit — or anybody from Abu Ghraib. And then it took a long time, though, for them to even go into that, and they, of course, dropped those charges, except for disobeying a direct order, because obviously, you know, that can be proven on a technical basis, because I had spoken to the media after being told not to.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about the mistreatment of General Zabar and his son?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Originally, the general was supposed to be interrogated, and this was the one interrogation I was actually a part of, and the only reason I agreed to be a part of it was because the interrogator, who really wasn’t an interrogator, was a former soldier of mine who was an analyst, and I knew I could trust him not to be an animal or to try to talk me into doing something I know I wouldn’t want to do. And so he came to Abu Ghraib from Camp Victory as a subject matter expert on the general, because he had been spending weeks and months studying this man in particular.

And when he finally arrived and we were supposed to go interrogate him, they said we couldn’t interrogate him because the general had already been broken from several hours of interrogation. But as a consolation, they said, “We have his son, and you can interrogate him.” You know, and I’m thinking, you know, wow, this is kind of crazy. You know, why do we have his son? But then I’m thinking, you know, just because he’s younger doesn’t mean he can’t be a part of some kind of criminal activity, you know, himself. So we went out to the general population, which is where he was located, and, you know, saw just how young he was. And, you know, he was very, very frail, very scared, and it was obvious he was coming from a rich family. And, you know, he was just petrified.

And, you know, we brought him in to interrogate him, which was really more of an interview, because, like I said, my friend is — he’s a pretty mild-mannered person. And it was just matter-of-fact questions that — and it became quite apparent that he didn’t know anything and that he was just guilty of being this general’s son. And then, he even told me about his brother also being there, wanting to know where he was.

And it was really kind of heartbreaking when he said that he was glad that we were there, but that he didn’t understand what we were doing now that we were there, you know? And he cited things that were happening to him, as well as, you know, how his family was — all their property was being seized by the Kurds because we were turning a blind eye to what the Kurds were doing. You know, and I was just like, wow! And then we took him back, and I come to find out, you know, what they had done to break his father, which was, you know, abusing him.

AMYGOODMAN: How had they abused him?

SAMUELPROVANCE: They had covered him in mud, or they had doused him in cold water and drove him around in a truck, which at that time was freezing cold at night, and covered him in mud and then, I guess, gave his father the impression that, “OK, we’re going to take a break from the interrogation, and you can see your son, who’s also here.” And then, you know, he’s thinking he’s going to see his son and have some kind of a reunion with him, but instead they just allowed him to see his son in this shivering, muddy state. And, you know, who knows what else they might have told him they had done to him or they were going to do to him unless he started talking? And then, supposedly, that’s what broke him down, and he told them whatever it is they wanted to know, but kind of find out later through — I guess they had done some investigation — but this guy was just some air defense general and he didn’t know anything himself. So the entire thing was just one big useless fiasco.

But you have this boy getting abused and his father getting abused, and it was all for nothing. And that really typifies the whole operation, because, as you know, what was found out later, you know, nothing really productive ever came out of Abu Ghraib. And I could have told you that when I was there, because I would talk to several of the soldiers, the MI soldiers that were there, and they were continuously coming up with, you know, poppycock reports from all sorts of information that they were getting from these detainees. And Colonel Pappas had instituted a quota system, so then they were even forced into this role of conjuring up reports and just sending them out there. But they don’t realize or take into account that they actually get used in the field and that it created this whole cycle of bad intel, picking up the wrong people, which created even more bad intel and which ended up creating more people getting detained. And they weren’t letting anybody go.

And then the prison became its own problem, because then, you know, we started getting more mortar attacks, more RPG attacks or sniper attacks or IEDs. And then the intelligence efforts became finding out who was attacking the prison more than what was actually going on in the insurgency or where was Saddam Hussein.

AMYGOODMAN: Sam Provance, you obviously know a lot about what happened at Abu Ghraib, yet on May 14, 2004, you were ordered not to talk about it. Tell us what happened.

SAMUELPROVANCE: It hadn’t been long after I had talked to General Fay, and of course the media had already tried to contact me, but I didn’t want to — you know, I didn’t know what was going on and I was trusting that the investigation would uncover, you know, what had happened, you know, that people under this unbearable burden of, you know, the scandal and the assumed scrutiny would begin — you know, somebody else, others, many others, would begin talking or confessing.

So, you know, one day I’m called in off-duty. I’m off duty, and I get called in from my company commander, and it’s like super emergency. And I come down to the company, and then it’s him and my first sergeant in his office. And then, he’s like — you know, he’s got this order in his hand written on a counseling form, and he’s like, “Don’t talk to me. Don’t ask me any questions. I just want you to read this and sign it,” which is highly irregular, because anytime you’re given any kind of a counseling form or an order, it’s read to you, and then, you know, you basically check in a block that you agree that what they have — you know, that what’s on that paper is what they’ve explained to you in person and that — not that you agree to it necessarily, but that you agree that that’s — you know, that you understand what is being told to you. And I could see he was under a lot of stress. I mean, he was very — because I even tried to ask him. I’m like, “Well, what if my mother needs to know that I’m not, you know, part of the abuse, you know, that I’m actually a part of trying to stop it?” And then he’s like, “I told you, don’t talk to me. Don’t ask me any questions. Just read this and sign it.” And so, you know, of course, I signed it.

And it was then that I knew, because that was after talking to General Fay — and it was then, at that moment, that I knew, you know, this was getting covered up. And then, once I found out that I was the only person that received such an order from the many other people in my unit that were there, that’s when I really knew this was — you know, the cover-up was in full swing. And from that moment on, I started thinking, OK, you know, if I don’t say anything, then nobody is going to say anything. So I had to say something. And then I actually hoped that when I spoke out that other people would start speaking out, too, but that didn’t happen. They just watched as, you know, I got into all that trouble, and then they saw what would happen to them if they spoke, too. And so, a lot of them to this day remain quiet.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, four days after you were ordered not to discuss Abu Ghraib, ABC News aired an interview with you. Three days later, your were administratively flagged, your top-secret clearance pulled. Talk about this period right through to July 2005, your rank being reduced.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, what they did is they suspended my clearance, which effectively kicked me out of the building I worked in. And I was then put into the headquarters platoon, which is where all the mischievous intelligence soldiers go because, you know, they’ve lost their clearance for having gotten into some kind of trouble.

AMYGOODMAN: Where was that?

SAMUELPROVANCE: It was in the headquarters platoon within the company.

AMYGOODMAN: Where?

SAMUELPROVANCE: That’s in Alpha Company 302nd.

AMYGOODMAN: Geographically, where?

SAMUELPROVANCE: That’s in Heidelberg, Germany. And so that they knew that I would get kicked out, because they didn’t want me working with the others. And they knew, by taking my clearance, that that would kick me out of the building, and then I couldn’t be — I could no longer be in that inner circle I told you about. So now I was on the outer circle with all the mechanics and the admin, the soldiers, the people in the offices, and that’s where I bounced around at. You know, one minute I was doing one thing, and another minute I’m doing the other. And they just kept in this limbo state for the longest time, and I didn’t know what was going to happen at any time.

And it wasn’t until sixteen months later that they suddenly said, “Hey, you have to drive up to Grafenveer to be read your Article 15.” And then, at the Article 15, I was told that if I didn’t accept the Article 15, which was going to be a demotion and possible loss of pay that I would have to, you know, demand a court-martial, and at that court-martial, I would be subject to prison up to ten years. And after talking to my lawyer, Scott Horton, you know, it was a lose-lose case because the military prosecution wins 90 percent of its cases, which is hardly a fair trial and which also goes to show, like at Colonel Jordan’s trial, how fixed that trial was, because military prosecution wins any case, essentially, that it wants to.

AMYGOODMAN: Ten years in prison for what?

SAMUELPROVANCE: For disobeying a direct order, which was speaking to the media.

SAMUELPROVANCE: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, you know, originally I was going to fight it and demand a court-martial, but like I said, my lawyer said this is their playing field, and, you know, they’ll do it. And, you know, all these people, they’re telling me that they support you, will be writing you Christmas cards when you’re in prison.

AMYGOODMAN: So where do you stand right now? You are a specialist?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Right. I was a specialist, and they never gave me a chance to get my rank back. And then they basically put me back into the same limbo state I had been in. And even though I was — even though my clearance was given back to me, I wasn’t given local clearance to work my job as an intelligence analyst anymore. So they kept me in this limbo state until the day I got out of the Army, which was October of last year. And since then, I’m basically still trying to get a job.

AMYGOODMAN: Are you having trouble?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Yeah, actually, I am. I mean, I know some things take time, but, you know — and I actually tried to work as a prison guard at a county jail, but that didn’t fare too well at all.

AMYGOODMAN: Why not?

SAMUELPROVANCE: To be honest, I didn’t want to be a part of another scandal.

AMYGOODMAN: Samuel Provance, so reflect now on what has happened to you. You had top security clearance, you were a staff sergeant, now you’re a guard at a mall and having trouble finding a job that you would like to keep. Was the whistleblowing worth it? Do you think that anything has been learned by the military? Do you think high-level officials should be prosecuted?

SAMUELPROVANCE: Well, on a personal level, obviously, I would say it’s not worth it, you know, but this is bigger than me. You know, this is about the integrity of right and wrong and, you know, how we’re portrayed to the world we’re supposedly trying to help. Has anything I’ve done or said made an effect? I don’t know. I mean, these things are so big and complex you really don’t know what difference you really make. You know, you just have to do it and hope for the best.

AMYGOODMAN: Former Army sergeant, Abu Ghraib whistleblower, Sam Provance, first intelligence specialist to speak openly about abuse at the prison, the only Military Intelligence soldier listed as a witness in the Teguba report. When Provance defied an order to speak to the media about what happened at Abu Ghraib, the Army stripped him of his security clearance, demoted him in rank and threatened him with ten years in jail.]]>

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500CACI Awarded Millions in New Govt. Contracts Despite Being Accused of Widespread Abuse in Lawsuit Brought by 256 Prisoners Held in Iraqi Jailshttp://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/14/caci_awarded_millions_in_new_gvt
tag:democracynow.org,2008-01-14:en/story/cde4d0 AMY GOODMAN : The US Army has awarded the private military contractor CACI International a $60 million contract to provide technical and maintenance support for the Army’s Directorate of Logistics in Fort Bliss, Texas. Earlier this month, CACI also captured a five-year $12.5 million contract to provide management support to the Department of Justice.
The contracts come despite a lawsuit CACI is facing for alleged abuses in Iraqi prisons, including Abu Ghraib. In December, 256 prisoners filed a lawsuit [alleging] CACI employees directed soldiers to mistreat the prisoners. The lawsuit was filed by Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights, a continuation of a class-action suit filed in 2004 after the leaking of the Taguba Report.
I spoke to Susan Burke the day she filed the suit against CACI . I began by asking her to explain the allegations in the lawsuit.
SUSAN BURKE : This is a lawsuit brought against one of the companies that privately participated, that made millions of dollars and participated with the criminal conduct of certain military people to torture prisoners. The military has convicted several already of this conspiracy to mistreat prisoners. What hasn’t been done is any type of criminal prosecution or accountability on the private side.
AMY GOODMAN : Let me ask you something. We know about people like Charles Graner, who was court-martialed, who’s in jail right now.
SUSAN BURKE : Right.
AMY GOODMAN : So you’re saying that US soldiers can be held accountable, but the military contractors who do the same thing, they often are let off scot-free. This, it seems to me, will be an issue for US soldiers saying this is not fair.
SUSAN BURKE : Well, it is. And the real question here is, why have they been let off scot-free? I mean, this is conduct that was testified about in the court-martials. This is conduct that’s known to the United States government. The Department of Justice really should be criminally prosecuting all the private corporate employees that were participants in this conspiracy.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about CACI&#8217;s role. For example, though you talk about this happening at other prisons, at Abu Ghraib, what exactly were these employees doing? Do you know individually who they are?
SUSAN BURKE : We know some and obviously hope to learn more, as we continue our investigation and continue the litigation. But what we know already comes from the investigations and the court-martials that have already gone on. And what we know is that when a CACI interrogator was placed into Abu Ghraib prison, that person held essentially the slot on the interrogation team where they were put in charge. And so, we have CACI interrogators being placed in charge of these teams.
AMY GOODMAN : You have private military contractors that US soldiers are answering to.
SUSAN BURKE : That’s correct. They had the same ability &mdash; these CACI private employees had the same ability to direct the military police vis-a-vis the treatment of the prisoners as did the military intelligence. So what you have, for example, is a gentleman, Steve Stefanowicz, and another gentleman, Daniel Johnson. Those two have been identified by Graner and Frederick and others as having been some of &mdash; among the group that would give them the orders to rough up the prisoners, to torture the prisoners. And so, Big Steve, for example &mdash; on one occasion, in fact, Graner even refused to follow one of Big Steve’s directives, because he found it too harsh. So you have &mdash;-
AMY GOODMAN : What had he directed him to do?
SUSAN BURKE : It was a case in which a prisoner that had been tortured was in such pain, and the interrogator, Big Steve, said, “Don’t give him any pain medication.” And Graner was afraid that it would cause death, and he gave him the pain medication.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, you’re alleging that there were deaths that resulted.
SUSAN BURKE : The people died in prison as a result of the torture, yes.
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re now representing hundreds of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. How do you find them? Tell us some of their individual stories.
SUSAN BURKE : Well, really they -&mdash; we don’t find them, they find us. We are &mdash; we have a couple of &mdash; it’s word of mouth. We started because a gentleman here in &mdash; a Swedish citizen, an Iraqi by birth, was living in Sweden. He had been at Abu Ghraib prison and tortured by Saddam Hussein. He fled the country when he was released, and he was living a regular ordinary life in Sweden, a Swedish citizen, raising his children with his wife. The fall of Saddam, he decides to go back to Iraq, over his wife’s objection. He gets picked up, put in Abu Ghraib prison and tortured. He’s then let go, goes back to Sweden.
He’s here in the United States visiting a cousin, some relatives out in the Dearborn area. He tells a male cousin, a gentleman close in his age, somebody that was like a brother to him &mdash; he tells the brother what happened to him. And it was terrible. I mean, he was one of the people that was, you know, rope tied to his penis, dragged naked back and forth against the concrete, terrible beatings. And so, he told the cousin what happened. And the cousin &mdash; and this is before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. The cousin said, you need to go talk to an American lawyer. So this gentleman walked into my co-counsel Shereef Akeel&#8217;s office out in the Detroit area. And as a result of that, that very first client, we then went forward, and the word spread throughout &mdash; we have a couple of guys there, and it just became word of mouth.
So what happens is, each community &mdash; each tribal community in Iraq has had torture victims in their midst. We go over. We’ve been to Jordan, we go to Turkey. We go over, and we tend to meet with people that are in a position of respected in their community. And they really &mdash; you know, they talk to us. They want to make sure our intentions are good. You know, think about this. These are people that have been tortured by Americans. So, you know, they come meet with us, and we tell them what we&#8217;re doing. We tell them how we&#8217;re trying to get accountability for this torture scandal. And then, usually what happens after that is the seven to ten victims within their own neighborhood, within their own community, then they come to us and sign up, and then we start &mdash; then we interview all of them individually.
AMY GOODMAN : And how did you trace these people who have been tortured at Abu Ghraib? And name some of the other prisons.
SUSAN BURKE : Well, the other &mdash; Camp Cropper. There was a lot of mistreatment at Cropper. Another facility near the Baghdad airport, Fallujah, Balad. Some of the worst torture, actually, is in these mobile facilities. For example, we had one gentleman, Ahmed, whose wife is a doctor, and he is a local businessman. He was brought in and kept three days naked, pouring cold water, and being kicked nonstop across the floor. Literally, like different shifts of the guards would come in and keep the kicking going. And that was at one of these mobile facilities. So the reality is that what is already on the record with Abu is only the tip of the torture iceberg. There&#8217;s a lot of torture that’s gone on, but there hasn’t been an investigation, other than ours, other than just a private, you know, firm with the Center for Constitutional Rights trying to investigate.
AMY GOODMAN : You say as a result, according to DoD’s own analysis, more than 80% of those persons swept up in this wholesale rounding up were innocents who ended up being released without any charges.
SUSAN BURKE : And for &mdash; you know, obviously, from my perspective, even somebody guilty, you don’t torture. But the terribly sad thing here is that, you know, what the military has said in their own reports, you know, gee, we didn’t have quite enough person power, so we reverted to rounding up anyone who looked suspicious. So, for example, if they had someone in a restaurant, they’d arrest the whole restaurant. And then it would take, you know, months, at times even years, for the people to get released. And in the meantime, some fraction of them ended up getting tortured.
AMY GOODMAN : CACI wouldn’t come on &mdash; they call themselves CACI &mdash; but they did give us a statement, saying “These accusations and allegations are just their latest in ever-changing lawsuit, a rehash of their original baseless submissions, part of their big lie propaganda campaign to keep their lawsuit afloat and their personal political agendas in the public light.” They&#8217;re talking about you and the Center for Constitutional Rights.
SUSAN BURKE : Well, certainly, they have taken &mdash; they’ve always taken this very aggressive stance: we did nothing wrong, our employees did nothing wrong, we had nothing to do with it. The problem for them as a publicly traded company is that this aggressive posture could, at the end of the day, you know, be considered securities fraud.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean?
SUSAN BURKE : Well, you can’t just lie. And that’s what CACI is doing. I mean, there is sworn-under-oath testimony about what we put in the complaint. And so, to me, I must say I’m a bit surprised that a publicly traded company would be willing to commit themselves to such misconduct.
AMY GOODMAN : But your original suit against them was filed in 2004. This is three years later. It’s been thrown out of court. You’ve now amended it. Why was it thrown out? How have you changed your strategy?
SUSAN BURKE : Well, it’s never been thrown out. It’s actually always proceeded. It’s the same lawsuit. The only difference is that in the past, we only named seven or eight victims and said that they were going to go forward as a representative of the class of everybody that was tortured. The judge said, no, you know, these are personal injuries, and so it’s not suitable to being treated as a class, so you need to come forward with everyone who’s actually approached you and, you know, put that on file.
The other new thing about this is that, you know, CACI makes the point in their response that it’s ever-changing. Well, yes, it is. We keep learning more and more. And so, this complaint is definitely different than what we first filed, because when we first filed, we didn’t know all of this. And so, we&#8217;ve learned a tremendous amount, and we’re going to keep learning a tremendous amount, and we’re going to keep amending the complaint, so that what we’ve learned becomes part of the public record.
AMY GOODMAN : Attorney Susan Burke has filed a lawsuit against CACI with the Center for Constitutional Rights. They’ve also sued Blackwater, the military contractor.AMYGOODMAN: The US Army has awarded the private military contractor CACI International a $60 million contract to provide technical and maintenance support for the Army’s Directorate of Logistics in Fort Bliss, Texas. Earlier this month, CACI also captured a five-year $12.5 million contract to provide management support to the Department of Justice.

The contracts come despite a lawsuit CACI is facing for alleged abuses in Iraqi prisons, including Abu Ghraib. In December, 256 prisoners filed a lawsuit [alleging] CACI employees directed soldiers to mistreat the prisoners. The lawsuit was filed by Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights, a continuation of a class-action suit filed in 2004 after the leaking of the Taguba Report.

I spoke to Susan Burke the day she filed the suit against CACI. I began by asking her to explain the allegations in the lawsuit.

SUSANBURKE: This is a lawsuit brought against one of the companies that privately participated, that made millions of dollars and participated with the criminal conduct of certain military people to torture prisoners. The military has convicted several already of this conspiracy to mistreat prisoners. What hasn’t been done is any type of criminal prosecution or accountability on the private side.

AMYGOODMAN: Let me ask you something. We know about people like Charles Graner, who was court-martialed, who’s in jail right now.

SUSANBURKE: Right.

AMYGOODMAN: So you’re saying that US soldiers can be held accountable, but the military contractors who do the same thing, they often are let off scot-free. This, it seems to me, will be an issue for US soldiers saying this is not fair.

SUSANBURKE: Well, it is. And the real question here is, why have they been let off scot-free? I mean, this is conduct that was testified about in the court-martials. This is conduct that’s known to the United States government. The Department of Justice really should be criminally prosecuting all the private corporate employees that were participants in this conspiracy.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about CACI’s role. For example, though you talk about this happening at other prisons, at Abu Ghraib, what exactly were these employees doing? Do you know individually who they are?

SUSANBURKE: We know some and obviously hope to learn more, as we continue our investigation and continue the litigation. But what we know already comes from the investigations and the court-martials that have already gone on. And what we know is that when a CACI interrogator was placed into Abu Ghraib prison, that person held essentially the slot on the interrogation team where they were put in charge. And so, we have CACI interrogators being placed in charge of these teams.

AMYGOODMAN: You have private military contractors that US soldiers are answering to.

SUSANBURKE: That’s correct. They had the same ability — these CACI private employees had the same ability to direct the military police vis-a-vis the treatment of the prisoners as did the military intelligence. So what you have, for example, is a gentleman, Steve Stefanowicz, and another gentleman, Daniel Johnson. Those two have been identified by Graner and Frederick and others as having been some of — among the group that would give them the orders to rough up the prisoners, to torture the prisoners. And so, Big Steve, for example — on one occasion, in fact, Graner even refused to follow one of Big Steve’s directives, because he found it too harsh. So you have —-

AMYGOODMAN: What had he directed him to do?

SUSANBURKE: It was a case in which a prisoner that had been tortured was in such pain, and the interrogator, Big Steve, said, “Don’t give him any pain medication.” And Graner was afraid that it would cause death, and he gave him the pain medication.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, you’re alleging that there were deaths that resulted.

SUSANBURKE: The people died in prison as a result of the torture, yes.

AMYGOODMAN: You’re now representing hundreds of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other prisons. How do you find them? Tell us some of their individual stories.

SUSANBURKE: Well, really they -— we don’t find them, they find us. We are — we have a couple of — it’s word of mouth. We started because a gentleman here in — a Swedish citizen, an Iraqi by birth, was living in Sweden. He had been at Abu Ghraib prison and tortured by Saddam Hussein. He fled the country when he was released, and he was living a regular ordinary life in Sweden, a Swedish citizen, raising his children with his wife. The fall of Saddam, he decides to go back to Iraq, over his wife’s objection. He gets picked up, put in Abu Ghraib prison and tortured. He’s then let go, goes back to Sweden.

He’s here in the United States visiting a cousin, some relatives out in the Dearborn area. He tells a male cousin, a gentleman close in his age, somebody that was like a brother to him — he tells the brother what happened to him. And it was terrible. I mean, he was one of the people that was, you know, rope tied to his penis, dragged naked back and forth against the concrete, terrible beatings. And so, he told the cousin what happened. And the cousin — and this is before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke. The cousin said, you need to go talk to an American lawyer. So this gentleman walked into my co-counsel Shereef Akeel’s office out in the Detroit area. And as a result of that, that very first client, we then went forward, and the word spread throughout — we have a couple of guys there, and it just became word of mouth.

So what happens is, each community — each tribal community in Iraq has had torture victims in their midst. We go over. We’ve been to Jordan, we go to Turkey. We go over, and we tend to meet with people that are in a position of respected in their community. And they really — you know, they talk to us. They want to make sure our intentions are good. You know, think about this. These are people that have been tortured by Americans. So, you know, they come meet with us, and we tell them what we’re doing. We tell them how we’re trying to get accountability for this torture scandal. And then, usually what happens after that is the seven to ten victims within their own neighborhood, within their own community, then they come to us and sign up, and then we start — then we interview all of them individually.

AMYGOODMAN: And how did you trace these people who have been tortured at Abu Ghraib? And name some of the other prisons.

SUSANBURKE: Well, the other — Camp Cropper. There was a lot of mistreatment at Cropper. Another facility near the Baghdad airport, Fallujah, Balad. Some of the worst torture, actually, is in these mobile facilities. For example, we had one gentleman, Ahmed, whose wife is a doctor, and he is a local businessman. He was brought in and kept three days naked, pouring cold water, and being kicked nonstop across the floor. Literally, like different shifts of the guards would come in and keep the kicking going. And that was at one of these mobile facilities. So the reality is that what is already on the record with Abu is only the tip of the torture iceberg. There’s a lot of torture that’s gone on, but there hasn’t been an investigation, other than ours, other than just a private, you know, firm with the Center for Constitutional Rights trying to investigate.

AMYGOODMAN: You say as a result, according to DoD’s own analysis, more than 80% of those persons swept up in this wholesale rounding up were innocents who ended up being released without any charges.

SUSANBURKE: And for — you know, obviously, from my perspective, even somebody guilty, you don’t torture. But the terribly sad thing here is that, you know, what the military has said in their own reports, you know, gee, we didn’t have quite enough person power, so we reverted to rounding up anyone who looked suspicious. So, for example, if they had someone in a restaurant, they’d arrest the whole restaurant. And then it would take, you know, months, at times even years, for the people to get released. And in the meantime, some fraction of them ended up getting tortured.

AMYGOODMAN: CACI wouldn’t come on — they call themselves CACI — but they did give us a statement, saying “These accusations and allegations are just their latest in ever-changing lawsuit, a rehash of their original baseless submissions, part of their big lie propaganda campaign to keep their lawsuit afloat and their personal political agendas in the public light.” They’re talking about you and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

SUSANBURKE: Well, certainly, they have taken — they’ve always taken this very aggressive stance: we did nothing wrong, our employees did nothing wrong, we had nothing to do with it. The problem for them as a publicly traded company is that this aggressive posture could, at the end of the day, you know, be considered securities fraud.

AMYGOODMAN: What do you mean?

SUSANBURKE: Well, you can’t just lie. And that’s what CACI is doing. I mean, there is sworn-under-oath testimony about what we put in the complaint. And so, to me, I must say I’m a bit surprised that a publicly traded company would be willing to commit themselves to such misconduct.

AMYGOODMAN: But your original suit against them was filed in 2004. This is three years later. It’s been thrown out of court. You’ve now amended it. Why was it thrown out? How have you changed your strategy?

SUSANBURKE: Well, it’s never been thrown out. It’s actually always proceeded. It’s the same lawsuit. The only difference is that in the past, we only named seven or eight victims and said that they were going to go forward as a representative of the class of everybody that was tortured. The judge said, no, you know, these are personal injuries, and so it’s not suitable to being treated as a class, so you need to come forward with everyone who’s actually approached you and, you know, put that on file.

The other new thing about this is that, you know, CACI makes the point in their response that it’s ever-changing. Well, yes, it is. We keep learning more and more. And so, this complaint is definitely different than what we first filed, because when we first filed, we didn’t know all of this. And so, we’ve learned a tremendous amount, and we’re going to keep learning a tremendous amount, and we’re going to keep amending the complaint, so that what we’ve learned becomes part of the public record.

AMYGOODMAN: Attorney Susan Burke has filed a lawsuit against CACI with the Center for Constitutional Rights. They’ve also sued Blackwater, the military contractor.]]>

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500Military Contractor CACI Accused of Widespread Abuse in Suit Brought By 256 Prisoners Held in Iraqi Jailshttp://www.democracynow.org/2007/12/19/military_contractor_caci_accused_of_widespread
tag:democracynow.org,2007-12-19:en/story/f1e520 AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to turn now to another company. Blackwater is not the only private US corporation facing lawsuits for alleged abuses in Iraq. On Monday, hundreds of Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons filed a lawsuit against the private military contractor, CACI . The company itself calls itself CACI .
The suit alleges the Iraqis were repeatedly sodomized, threatened with rape, kept naked in their cells, subjected to electric shock, attacked by unmuzzled dogs, subjected to serious pain inflicted on sensitive body parts while being held at Abu Ghraib. The suit alleges employees of CACI directed soldiers to mistreat prisoners at Abu Ghraib and that employees of the company were involved in the wrongful deaths of three Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib.
The lawsuit was filed, once again, by Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights, joining us today in our studio, as we’ve been talking to her through the hour. Talk about this lawsuit you’ve just filed in the last day.
SUSAN BURKE : Well, this is actually a continuation of a lawsuit that we previously filed back in June of 2004. We had brought it as a class action after the leaking of the Taguba Report and after we had been approached by some of the victims of the Abu Ghraib torture.
And one thing I would point out is that this &mdash; CACI&#8217;s conduct in this instance &mdash; CACI employees were directly involved in torturing prisoners. This is information that’s known. It’s information that is known to the Department of Justice. Yet, there have not been any criminal prosecutions. So when you think about the passage of time here, you have to ask: why have there been no criminal prosecutions? It’s very troubling, and it’s very concerning that our civil action is the only current mechanism for accountability for the private participation in the Abu Ghraib scandal.
The other comment I would make is that there’s a perception that it was just the Abu Ghraib scandal and that that’s the only place where the torture occurred. You know, sadly, that’s just not true. The same type of conduct was happening elsewhere. People were being mistreated in other facilities. And again, CACI was not in all of the facilities, but they were in a substantial number, and their employees participated.
AMY GOODMAN : We invited CACI to join us on the program today, but they declined our request. CACI spokesperson Jody Brown issued the following statement, though. She said, “CACI totally rejects and denies all the plaintiffs&#8217; allegations and clams in their amended legal filing of December 17, 2007. These accusations and allegations in their latest and ever-changing lawsuit are a rehash of their original baseless submissions. The attempt by plaintiffs’ counsel to portray CACI as engaged in a conspiracy to abuse detainees is unmitigated fiction perpetrated by plaintiffs’ counsel as part of their big lie propaganda campaign to keep their lawsuit afloat and their personal political agendas in the public light. Three-and-a-half years after filing their original complaint, not one of the more than 200 plaintiffs has connected their generic allegations of abuse to any CACI personnel. No CACI employee or former employee has been charged with any misconduct in connection with CACI’s interrogation work in Iraq. From day one, CACI has rejected the outrageous allegations of this lawsuit and will continue to do so.” Susan Burke, your response?
SUSAN BURKE : Well, the reality is that the information that we have is information that is under oath testimony from court-martials. And so, there are &mdash; the co-conspirators, the people that are serving time in prison, are the ones that are identifying Big Steve and DJ and the others as having given them the orders to torture. So for CACI to be &mdash; it’s interesting that CACI is so aggressive in their denials, when they know that on the record in under oath testimony is direct evidence.
AMY GOODMAN : What do you mean, court-martial testimony?
SUSAN BURKE : There were a series of court-martials, when Charles Graner was convicted, Frederick &mdash;- Sergeant Frederick was convicted. And so, the testimony from the convicted torturers has labeled -&mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : You&#8217;re talking about CACI directing US soldiers?
SUSAN BURKE : Yes, the CACI interrogators were placed in the role of the military intelligence.
AMY GOODMAN : We&#8217;re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue our discussion tomorrow. We have been talking with Susan Burke, working with the Center for Constitutional Rights, about the CACI lawsuit and the two Blackwater lawsuits about two attacks, September 9th and September 16th. And special thanks also to Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch.AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to turn now to another company. Blackwater is not the only private US corporation facing lawsuits for alleged abuses in Iraq. On Monday, hundreds of Iraqis held at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons filed a lawsuit against the private military contractor, CACI. The company itself calls itself CACI.

The suit alleges the Iraqis were repeatedly sodomized, threatened with rape, kept naked in their cells, subjected to electric shock, attacked by unmuzzled dogs, subjected to serious pain inflicted on sensitive body parts while being held at Abu Ghraib. The suit alleges employees of CACI directed soldiers to mistreat prisoners at Abu Ghraib and that employees of the company were involved in the wrongful deaths of three Iraqi men at Abu Ghraib.

The lawsuit was filed, once again, by Susan Burke and the Center for Constitutional Rights, joining us today in our studio, as we’ve been talking to her through the hour. Talk about this lawsuit you’ve just filed in the last day.

SUSANBURKE: Well, this is actually a continuation of a lawsuit that we previously filed back in June of 2004. We had brought it as a class action after the leaking of the Taguba Report and after we had been approached by some of the victims of the Abu Ghraib torture.

And one thing I would point out is that this — CACI’s conduct in this instance — CACI employees were directly involved in torturing prisoners. This is information that’s known. It’s information that is known to the Department of Justice. Yet, there have not been any criminal prosecutions. So when you think about the passage of time here, you have to ask: why have there been no criminal prosecutions? It’s very troubling, and it’s very concerning that our civil action is the only current mechanism for accountability for the private participation in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

The other comment I would make is that there’s a perception that it was just the Abu Ghraib scandal and that that’s the only place where the torture occurred. You know, sadly, that’s just not true. The same type of conduct was happening elsewhere. People were being mistreated in other facilities. And again, CACI was not in all of the facilities, but they were in a substantial number, and their employees participated.

AMYGOODMAN: We invited CACI to join us on the program today, but they declined our request. CACI spokesperson Jody Brown issued the following statement, though. She said, “CACI totally rejects and denies all the plaintiffs’ allegations and clams in their amended legal filing of December 17, 2007. These accusations and allegations in their latest and ever-changing lawsuit are a rehash of their original baseless submissions. The attempt by plaintiffs’ counsel to portray CACI as engaged in a conspiracy to abuse detainees is unmitigated fiction perpetrated by plaintiffs’ counsel as part of their big lie propaganda campaign to keep their lawsuit afloat and their personal political agendas in the public light. Three-and-a-half years after filing their original complaint, not one of the more than 200 plaintiffs has connected their generic allegations of abuse to any CACI personnel. No CACI employee or former employee has been charged with any misconduct in connection with CACI’s interrogation work in Iraq. From day one, CACI has rejected the outrageous allegations of this lawsuit and will continue to do so.” Susan Burke, your response?

SUSANBURKE: Well, the reality is that the information that we have is information that is under oath testimony from court-martials. And so, there are — the co-conspirators, the people that are serving time in prison, are the ones that are identifying Big Steve and DJ and the others as having given them the orders to torture. So for CACI to be — it’s interesting that CACI is so aggressive in their denials, when they know that on the record in under oath testimony is direct evidence.

AMYGOODMAN: What do you mean, court-martial testimony?

SUSANBURKE: There were a series of court-martials, when Charles Graner was convicted, Frederick —- Sergeant Frederick was convicted. And so, the testimony from the convicted torturers has labeled -—

AMYGOODMAN: You’re talking about CACI directing US soldiers?

SUSANBURKE: Yes, the CACI interrogators were placed in the role of the military intelligence.

AMYGOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, but we’re going to continue our discussion tomorrow. We have been talking with Susan Burke, working with the Center for Constitutional Rights, about the CACI lawsuit and the two Blackwater lawsuits about two attacks, September 9th and September 16th. And special thanks also to Jennifer Daskal of Human Rights Watch.]]>